Practically everyone who ever heard a Christmas song or tune knows that Irving Berlin wrote “White Christmas” and that Tchaikovsky composed “The Nutcracker Suite.” Although seasonal masterpieces get their due in the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra’s delightful “Holiday Joy” concert, Leroy Anderson is the star composer in this diverse and illuminating program.

Not exactly a household name, Anderson arranged a medley – first recorded by the Boston Pops in 1950 – into a classical overture he called “A Christmas Festival,” featuring the greatest holiday hits we all know (except maybe only Brits are familiar with “Good King Wenceslas”). After this collection opened “Holiday Joy,” MSO’s Grammy-winning music director confessed his love of Christmas music regardless of his Jewish heritage. Irving Berlin would very likely agree.

Rob McGinniss

On a crowded Avalon Theatre stage with 39 musicians, including Repper, who played two pieces on a keyboard because there was no room for a sit down piano, the orchestra boldly proclaimed that “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” before another piece by Leroy Anderson riveted our attention thanks to the clarion call of three MSO trumpeters – Luis Engelke, Josh Carr, and Ross McCool. In fact, Anderson’s “Bugler’s Holiday” is more widely associated with Fourth of July fireworks than Christmas stockings hanging from a fireplace mantel. But as performed by the trumpet trio accompanied by a fulsome orchestra, the holiday spirit transposed seamlessly from a key of July to one of December.

But that was hardly the only liberty Repper took in presenting “Holiday Joy.” While the duet from Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville,” starring soprano soloist Claire Galloway and baritone Rob McGinniss, has nothing to do with Christmas or any other holiday – unless there’s one on the Italian calendar I missed – this rendition of a scene from arguably the best comic operas ever created is worth celebrating any day or night it’s performed. Never mind that it’s all sung in Italian, the actorly skills of Galloway and McGinniss translate beyond language barriers, not to mention their sonorous and soaring tones. But if you insist, McGinniss, as Figaro declares, “Women, women – eternal gods!/Who can figure you out?”

The lovely “Christmas Waltz” by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne and McGinnis’s interpretation of “White Christmas” preceded the “Barber of Seville” diversion that returned to seasonal form with Galloway’s soulful “In the Bleak Midwinter.” Based on a poem by Christina Rossetti, originally titled “A Christmas Carol” before Charles Dickens published his Scrooge salvation saga, it was later set to music by Gustav Holst. 

More cheerfully, we were advised to have ourselves “A Merry Little Christmas” by Galloway and McGinniss, who, it turns out, were classmates with Repper at Baltimore’s Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University Conservatory of Music. 

Not forgetting his heritage, Repper led the orchestra in Robert Wendel’s “Hanukkah Overture,” comprised of liturgical pieces and more widely recognized portions of “Rock of Ages” and “I Have a Little Dreidel,” laced with jazzy overtones suitable for Hanukkah’s eight-night Festival of Lights, beginning this year on Dec. 7.

Leroy Anderson kicks off the second half of “Holiday Joy” with “Sleigh Ride,” which, for my money, is way more jingly than “Jingle Bells.” You’ll be convinced I’m right when you hear it led by Repper in his Santa hat. A nod to the “Nutcracker Suite” is inevitable in any Christmas concert. But the orchestra gave Tchaikovsky’s sumptuous melodies their due with four selections we know from Disney’s “Fantasia,” if not from ubiquitous holiday performances of the ballet. 

Claire Galloway

One of the few sacred songs on the program, “O Holy Night,” just about brought the full house at the Avalon down – you might say on our knees, except there was no room for that at our seats. Galloway brought both reverence and inspiration to the lyrics and their echoes in what believers and non-believers alike have heard and recited most of their lives. Through all three verses, she calibrated her soaring lyric soprano voice to enable a thrilling culmination. 

Next, the program incorrectly listed “White Christmas” a second time. Instead, with Repper at the keyboard, McGinniss sang my (and the music director’s) personal favorite. I have no nit to pick on the baritone’s interpretation of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” nor Repper’s accompaniment as the rest of the orchestra raptly listened along with the audience. But it’s not possible in my universe for anyone to top Nat King Cole on his simply perfect reading of Mel Torme’s all-time classic, “The Christmas Song.” 

The soprano and baritone returned with a “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” which, compared to their earlier contributions, amounted to a live singing holiday card. But their finale, narrating the text of Clement Moore’s literally immortal words in “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” showed off the acting skills of McGinniss and Galloway. The orchestra became an extra character in the reading to music composed by Bill Holcombe, with sound-effect punctuations emanating from every section of players. 

After a well-deserved standing ovation, virtually everyone sat back in their seats for a singalong encore of first-verse-only versions of songs everyone who ever observed Christmas knows by heart. The evening fully lived up to its billing: “Holiday Joy.”

Note: The “Holiday Joy” concerts are dedicated to longtime MSO patron Norma Redele, who passed away recently. Repper said Redele introduced Jeffrey Parker, the current MSO board president, to the orchestra.

***

The MSO is not done with its season’s greetings after the weekend’s remaining “Holiday Joy” performances. As part of the orchestra’s Ensemble Series, a pair of “Holiday Quintet” concerts will be presented at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 15, at Epworth United Methodist Church in Rehoboth Beach and at 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 17, at Christ Church in Easton. After that, at the same Easton venue, “A Toast to the New Year” concert, featuring the full orchestra and mezzo-soprano Taylor Hillary Boykins, offers a joyful, tuneful New Year’s Eve celebration starting at 7 p.m., time enough for you to welcome at midnight the year 2024 in your own way. Remember that admission to the MSO concert is separate from the First Night Talbot events happening up and down Harrison Street just outside Christ Church. 

‘Holiday Joy’ Concerts

Thursday night, Nov. 30, at Avalon Theatre, Easton. Also, 7 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 2, Epworth United Methodist Church, Rehoboth Beach, and 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 3, Ocean City Performing Arts Center, midatlanticsymphony.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic now living in Easton.

Delmarva Review, a national literary journal with local roots, announced publication of its 16th edition presenting new poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction from 72 authors in 23 states, the District of Columbia, and four foreign countries. The review publishes the most compelling new writing selected from thousands of submissions during the year.

“Through the author’s voice, we discover new truths about ourselves,” said Wilson Wyatt, executive editor, from St. Michaels. “Perhaps more than anything this describes our connections with literature and the reasons to pursue the best.”

Since its beginning in 2008, Delmarva Review has published new literary prose and poetry from 550 authors in 47 states, the District of Columbia, and 19 foreign countries. Almost half are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. Including 2023, ninety will have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Some have attained attention in “best of” anthologies or received public acclaim from other literary critics and editors.

This year’s cover photograph is called “Eye of the Beholder.” It is a fitting description for the Red-tailed hawk’s large “eye,” on the cover, that allows the raptor to focus on its prey with spatial clarity from great heights at high speed.

The review’s editors cull through thousands of submissions to find the best new writing for publication. They read every submission, without regard to an author’s home region or any other factor except the writing quality that makes one gem rise above the rest.

There is no single theme except for the “uncomfortable reality of change.” Topics naturally include dealing with grief, sickness, death, acceptance, love, human freedoms, aging, and life’s uncertainties. Storytelling is always about change.

Delmarva Review was created to offer authors a valued home to publish their best writing at a time when many commercial publications were reducing literary content or closing their doors.

Announcing the Talbot Arts High School Mentorship-Scholarship Winner:

The editors are pleased to include the 2023 winner of the Delmarva Review-Talbot County Youth Writing Scholarship award. In partnership with Talbot County Schools and supported by a grant from Talbot Arts, the review selected a personal essay by Mia Mazzeo, a junior at Easton High School, in Easton, Maryland.

The winning student collaborated with the managing editor, as a writing mentor, to prepare for publication in this issue, and she received a monetary award.

Announcing The Best of the Delmarva Review; Submissions are paused for 2024:

The review is pleased to announce “The Best of the Delmarva Review” anthology will be published in 2024. It will include the editors’ selections of the best poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction published in the review since its founding sixteen years ago.
The normal submissions period will be paused now through 2024 allowing editors to focus on selecting the best work of the 550 writers who have been published in the Delmarva Review since 2008.

Information about the anthology and future submissions will be made periodically on the website.

In addition to Wyatt, the journal’s editorial staff includes Bill Gourgey, managing editor, of Washington, DC, poetry editor Anne Colwell, of Milton, DE, poetry assistant editor Katherine Gekker, of Alexandria, VA, fiction senior editor Harold O. Wilson, of Chester, MD, fiction coeditors Lee Slater, of Norfolk, VA, and Judy Reveal, of Greenville, MD, nonfiction editor Ellen Brown, of Duluth, MN, Gerald F. Sweeney, book review editor, of Easton, MD, and student intern, Sawyer Gourgey, assistant website manager, from Washington, DC.

Biographical information on each member of the editorial staff is listed on the review’s website (see below). All are volunteers who are experienced in their fields.

As an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary publisher, the journal greatly appreciates the financial support it receives from individual tax-deductible contributions and a public grant from Talbot Arts, with revenues from the Maryland State Arts Council.
The Delmarva Review, Vol. 16, is available in paperback and electronic editions from most major online booksellers. The print edition is also available at regional specialty bookstores. For more information, see the website: DelmarvaReview.org

Let’s start with First Night December – Dec. 1 in Rock Hall with pianist and impresario Joe Holt’s concert presentation of “It’s Almost Christmas, Charlie Brown.” The show is a tribute in song to Charles Schulz’s holiday TV classics by the late jazz pianist and composer Vince Guaraldi, who pretty much defined the “Peanuts” animated soundtrack. Drummer Greg Burrows and bassist Tom Baldwin join Holt at Rock Hall’s “home of musical magic,” The Mainstay, 5753 N. Main St. Showtime begins at 8.

mainstayrockhall.org

Chestertown’s Garfield Center for the Arts gift wraps its production of the 2019 screenplay adaptation based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel “Little Women,” which begins and ends on Christmas Day, 15 years apart. The Off-Broadway debut of Kate Hamill’s revision brings still-relevant women’s issues to light while still focusing on the March family of a mother and her daughters growing into adulthood while their father is off to defend the Union during the Civil War. The play runs on weekends, Dec. 1-17.

garfieldcenter.org 

’Peake Players, the student theater company of Chesapeake College at Wye Mills, brings “The Snow Show” – a mash-up of 18th- and 19th-century Christmas tales – to the stage of Todd Performing Arts Center, Dec. 7-9. The plot, such as it is, finds a family stuck in a snowbank on the way to Grandpa’s place. Pushing a wheelbarrow uphill, Grandpa struggles to come to their rescue. But he can’t make it without the help of dancers moving to tunes inspired by characters from “The Little Match Girl,” “Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox,” and “The Beggar King” in this multicultural celebration.

chesapeake.edu/peake-players

Church Hill Theatre’s holiday season offering is a staged version of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” based on the 1938 radio version directed by Orson Welles and starring Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge. (No, we’re not expecting either of those late-greats to appear as the Ghost of Christmas Past.) But you can catch this adaptation at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Dec. 15 and 16, or matinees at 2 on Dec. 16 and 17 at 103 Walnut St., Church Hill.

churchhilltheatre.org

Adkins Arboretum in Ridgely invites you to ride along with them to Kennett Square, Pa., to enjoy the ever-popular, always-spectacular “A Longwood Christmas” – as in Longwood Gardens. Upon arrival, take a walk and a look around the botanical wonders, indoors and out, before settling down – maybe you can find a cozy spot next to a firepit – to experience the wondrous show of a half-million lights entwined in a botanically inspired configuration to create a visual rivaling the best Fourth of July fireworks you’ve ever seen. (Sunset at this post-daylight-savings time of year is 4:35 or so.)

The bus trip departs Aurora Park Drive in Easton at 1 p.m., 20 minutes later at the U.S. 50/Route 404 park and ride, and 1:45 at the park and ride at Routes 301/291, Millington. The return trip begins at 8 p.m. and arrives at 10-ish at Queen Anne’s and Talbot stops. Members of Adkins get a $40 discount on advance reservations. (If you miss the bus trip, “A Longwood Christmas” runs through Jan. 7 with Christmas Day and a few more days off.) Meanwhile, coming up at Adkins: Although it will still be several days short of winter on Sunday, Dec. 10, you can get a taste and up-close view of the season with a guided walk through the arboretum’s Caroline County meadows, woodland, and wetlands led by Margan Glover revealing sounds and sights of thrumming woodpeckers, dry forest weeds abloom and unfrozen creeks trickling. 

adkinsarboretum.org

Temple B’nai Israel in Easton, more widely known regionally as the Salter Center for Jewish Life on the Eastern Shore, holds an ecumenical Community Menorah Lighting, 5-6:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10, led by Rabbi Peter Hyman. The first night of Hanukkah is observed at the temple on Dec. 8 with a candle lighting and a new-member Shabbat service with guest cantorial soloist Anita Stoll. Hanukkah observances will continue each evening through the eighth night, with a final candle lighting at 4:26.
bnaiisraeleaston.org

Easton Choral Arts Society didn’t steal my “Home for the Holidays” line for its annual Christmastime concerts at Christ Church. We both “borrowed” it from Perry Como’s holiday hit of the same name – “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays” – released in 1954. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if that classic made it to the playlist for performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 7, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10. Artistic director Alexis Renee Ward promises a musical travelog, from Southern gospel and Midwestern regional folk to Northeastern folk rock and West Coast cinematic soundtracks. But the highlight may well be the world premiere of “Santa Lucia” composed by Ward, based on the Festival of Lights first observed on these shores by 17th-century settlers along the Delaware River. The ecumenical program of secular and sacred music includes works celebrating Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, as well as Christmas. The winter holidays, indeed.

eastonchoralarts.org 

Dorchester Center for the Arts hosts its annual “Merry Market” show and sale where you can peruse potential holiday gifts no one else will find on Amazon or at whatever mall that still exists. That’s what Shop Small Saturday, the day after Black Friday, is all about. Member artists display various finely crafted art, including pottery, jewelry, candles, and more, along with paintings, small sculptures, and other art constructs. Meet many of the artists at DCA’s Second Saturday reception on Dec. 9. But while you’re at it, don’t overlook the center’s current exhibit, the “Red Zone Project,” drawn from the Human Trafficking Awareness Art Project as part of the partnership of the Talbot-based For All Seasons crisis center with the Dorchester Detention Center. Not so merry, merry. But, as they say, there but for the grace of God (or whomever) go I. Both shows run through Dec. 23 at 321 High St., Cambridge.

dorchesterarts.org

***

It’s not exactly a holiday, but it’s well worth celebrating the career of Don Buxton, who is retiring from 30-plus years as executive director of Chesapeake Music. But his influence and leadership in music on the Shore stretches beyond his extraordinary accomplishments at CM. Besides establishing the top-notch Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival that ushers in the summertime with notes of inspiration and artistry, the springtime Chesapeake International Chamber Music Competition for Young Professionals showcases the talents and promise of the next generation of virtuoso geniuses. 

But beyond Chesapeake Music, Buxton was a central figure in establishing a professional symphony orchestra in Easton and the Delmarva Peninsula, serving as conductor in the inaugural seasons of the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra. In celebration of his career, CM presents its “Salute to Don Buxton” with a video presentation too short to cover all his merits, but also a performance by Chesapeake Music co-artistic directors – cellist Marcy Rosen and violinist Catherine Cho – as well as fellow chamber festival stalwarts pianist Diana Walsh and violist Todd Phillips. Expect only the best in honor of Don Buxton, 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10, at the elegant Ebenezer Theatre. Chesapeake Music headquarters are next door in downtown Easton.

chesapeakemusic.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

Remarkably, 50 years after the assassination, seven of the surviving doctors who attended President John K. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital in Dallas were interviewed for a documentary, “JFK: What the Doctors Saw,” now streaming a decade later on Parliament +. 

Several of those doctors – along with others who have since died – were among those I was scheduled to interview for the Baltimore Sun in 1976 when the House Select Committee on Assassinations was investigating the murders of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. (More later on what became – or didn’t – of my attempt to interview those who tried to save JFK’s life 60 years ago on Nov. 22.)

As directed by Barbara Shearer, “What the Doctors Saw” is just that. There is no sidetracking – nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald except his claim to be a “patsy” in denying that he was the assassin, whether alone or with help. We don’t even hear a word about what we’ve all known for six decades – that Jack Ruby murdered Oswald just two days after JFK was shot dead.

What we do hear over and over, almost ad nauseam is that each doctor observed what they consistently and unanimously maintain was a dime-sized entry wound at the president’s throat, subsequently obscured by a tracheotomy in a futile attempt to resuscitate him. The massive wound they observed on the right at the back of his skull was unquestionably, to all of them, an exit wound. Any such bullet entering and exiting in that manner would have to have come from the front or slightly to the right of the president from his back seat in the fatal limousine. It could not possibly have been shot from behind – a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald was working on the day of the assassination. Other shots causing a shallow wound in the president’s back and another that seriously wounded then-Texas Governor John Connally in the front seat of the limousine did come from that direction.

Most disturbing in the documentary are recollections by Dr. Robert McClellan and others that a dark-suited man they took to be a Secret Service agent approached Dr. Malcolm Perry, the lead surgeon of the Parkland team, in Trauma Room 1 after he announced the president’s death and described an entry wound to the throat. “You must never call that an entrance wound again if you know what’s good for you,” McClellan quoted the presumed member of JFK’s security detail.

More suspicious, if not downright conspiratorial, was the apparently botched presidential autopsy, as recalled by Jim Jenkins, the one surviving member of the naval team conducting it. Under Texas law, an autopsy resulting from a deadly crime must be conducted in the county of jurisdiction. But the Parkland doctors and investigators of the assassination say that the Secret Service muscled the president’s body into a vehicle bound for Love Field and a flight to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital by two military physicians who were not pathologists and had virtually no experience performing autopsies.

While the documentary strongly suggests a government coverup that resulted in a rubber-stamp lone-assassin verdict by the Warren Commission on Sept. 24, 1964 – barely two months before the presidential election that resulted in President Lyndon Johnson’s first full term in office – there are arguably benign motives behind this rush to judgment. The Cuban Missile Crisis, resolved peacefully just more than a year before JFK’s assassination, involved a former member of the Marine Corps – Oswald – who defected to the Soviet Union and returned to the U.S. with no apparent action taken against him. Johnson is heard in a recorded conversation regarding the Warren report that it would help avert a third world war and save millions of lives. 

We’ll never know, of course. And most likely, after 60 years, we’ll never know the whole truth about the JFK assassination. 

But personally, I’m disappointed that the questions asked in this documentary were not asked before a half-century had passed. At least they were asked before all the Parkland doctors had passed on. The Sun was prepared to ask those questions of the same doctors – when, back in 1976, many of them were still working at Parkland. Based on my front-page story derived from House Select Assassinations Committee leaks and an interview with photographic expert witness Robert Grodin, Sun managing editor Paul Banker authorized my trip to Dallas with autopsy photographs turned over to the panel. My mission: Ask the doctors I had contacted – including one attending Connally – about what they saw when the president and the governor were brought to trauma rooms 1 and 2 on Nov. 22, 1963. 

Accompanied by an attorney who would notarize their comments about the photographs, I boarded a flight to Houston from Baltimore-Washington International with a subsequent connection to Dallas. The flight, however, was delayed more than three hours after a fuel truck struck a wing of our TWA jetliner. Engineers from McDonnell Douglas were consulted about safety concerns. We arrived in Houston too late for flight connections to Dallas and had little chance of getting there by car rental before the early Saturday tee times for four of the doctors I was to interview. 

In a 1975 TV interview with Geraldo Rivera, Grodin, and Dick Gregory introduced a home movie of the assassination, shot by Abraham Zapruder in shocking color. A year later, after being introduced by one of my sources, Grodin agreed to give me copies of JFK autopsy photos for the purpose of showing them to the Parkland doctors. In a minority report as part of the House probe, Grodin argued that the official autopsy photos were doctored to make the massive wound toward the back of Kennedy’s head – much of his brain was exposed with bits of it splattered on Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink suit – to resemble a nickel-sized entry wound. 

The photos that the doctors called fakes in the Paramount + documentary appear to my eyes to be the same images I had in my possession 48 years ago. But, unbeknownst to me, my most conspiratorially minded source had made his own way to Dallas. Freaked out and suspecting some sort of foul play at BWI, he called my boss in the middle of the night, advising him to call the FBI and speculating that the CIA had targeted me. Though I had arranged interviews with Parkland doctors the following weekend, I was taken off the story. And the photocopies were returned. With nothing to show the doctors but grainy black-and-white Xeroxes, the reporter sent in my stead to Dallas came up empty.

So, that’s my excuse for never getting to ask the doctors what they saw. But what about the rest of the news media? Why didn’t anyone else step forward to ask the doctors what they saw on Nov. 22, 1963? I procured the photographs surreptitiously. But they’ve long since been published. Maybe it’s the mishandling of JFK assassination investigations that launched our national doubts about the official line fueling our current conspiracy-theory gullibility.

I have a novel on weird theories about JFK and 9/11. Unpublished – like my best shot in 1976 for a Pulitzer in investigative reporting. It’s called “Camelot and the Second Coming.” Tell me if you know a likely agent.

Steve Parks is a retired reporter, editor, and critic now living in Easton.

Renowned smooth jazz saxophonist and St. Michaels native Anthony “Turk” Cannon will perform at CBMM’s Welcome Center Grand Opening on Dec. 2.

Growing up in St. Michaels, Anthony Cannon learned the joys and challenges of working the water from his father, Wilson “Turk” Cannon.

From a young age, Anthony and his four siblings were out on their dad’s workboat Doris N. sorting the day’s catch of crabs and tonging for oysters.

Yet, Anthony said he didn’t start to realize the full impact that the iconic waterman made across generations in the local community until his death in 2014 at the age of 80.

“I knew my father was well-known and liked in St. Michaels, but Dad didn’t talk about the stuff that he did,” Cannon said. “Half the stuff, I didn’t know he did until he had passed. People would just come and talk about my father. I didn’t know. He never talked about it.”

That family history explains why Anthony Cannon, now a nationally recognized smooth jazz saxophonist known by the stage name Anthony “Turk” Cannon in homage to his father, is so proud and excited about his upcoming performance at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum on Dec. 2 as part of the Grand Opening for its new Welcome Center.

During the celebration of the transformational new building, Cannon will take the stage with his five-piece jazz ensemble overlooking Fogg’s Cove adjacent to the Oystering on the Chesapeake exhibition that houses the skipjack E.C. Collier that Turk Cannon crewed on for years as well as a life-size cutout picturing and quotes from the waterman who was a primary source during the construction of the display.

Now living in Pennsylvania, Cannon said it’s always special to perform on the Eastern Shore, and even better that this gig is just a stone’s throw from the house on Lee Street where Cannon grew up that remains in his family and continues to feel like home.

“I’m most comfortable every time I come across that Bay Bridge,” Cannon said. “Playing (at CBMM), I feel like I’m supposed to be here. You’ll hear it, and you’ll see it. We’re going to have a lot of fun.”

The Cannon family has quite a story to share.

Turk Cannon was the son of a farmer who grew up near Crisfield before marrying his wife Doris and relocating to St. Michaels at the age of 18 to seek a career on the water. The Cannons were married for 61 years, raising five children along the way.

Turk Cannon was a fixture in St. Michaels Harbor with his boat moored at the Honeymoon Bridge adjacent to CBMM’s campus. He was happy to share his passion with his kids but also sure to encourage them to find their own paths.

It was a tremendous point of pride for Turk that none of his children became watermen and three of them earned college degrees.

“We saw how hard he and my mom worked, and we just didn’t want to disappoint them,” said Anthony Cannon, who earned baseball scholarship to Howard University and went on to a professional career in cybersecurity.

Cannon said his unlikely music career is a reflection of that upbringing. He took up the clarinet at St. Michaels Middle School before quitting in eighth grade to focus on baseball, and he didn’t pick up the saxophone until he was 33 years old.

Long a jazz fan, Cannon got the motivation that he needed to pursue his dream at a music festival in the 1990s when renowned jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison encouraged him to “go get a horn” and start playing.

Just like that, Cannon enrolled in music theory classes at a local community college and began his journey. Today, he plays alongside a who’s who of world-renowned musicians, has endorsement deals for his sax, mouthpiece, and ligatures, and his original compositions are featured on all the major music streaming platforms.

Ultimately, Cannon believes the confidence and drive necessary to launch a successful music career from such humble beginnings comes from his father’s constant encouragement.

“This is a guy who didn’t go to college or even high school, but he never said no to us trying to be better,” Cannon said. “He always used to say, ‘If you’re going to do it, do it. Don’t play around with it.’”

That sentiment explains why he added his father’s nickname to his stage. Most of his friends in the industry now call him Turk, just like all the watermen used to do with his dad.

“I was so proud of his life,” said Cannon, who also has a forthcoming song called “Turk.” “When he passed away, I wanted to make sure I kept his name out there and people didn’t forget him.”

At CBMM, Turk Cannon’s memory is alive and well through the Oystering exhibition. The waterman was part of E.C. Collier’s crew when it ceased operation in 1983 with the death of Capt. John Larrimore, and when the dredge boat became part of the exhibition in the early 1990s, he served as a primary source describing life on the vessel.

Turk Cannon was honored by the Talbot Watermen Association during Watermen’s Appreciation Day at CBMM in 2012, and because he faithfully took Doris N. around Navy Point and out on the Miles River almost daily well into his 70s, he’s still fondly remembered by many local residents.

No doubt many of those friends will be on hand for Anthony Cannon’s performance at the Welcome Center Grand Opening on Dec. 2. It’s fitting that a son of St. Michaels will help usher in the next chapter in CBMM’s history with a nod to the past and his family’s rich legacy.

“We’re going to get it,” Cannon said with a wide smile. “We’re going to play some cover tunes. We’re going to play some of my original stuff. It’s going to be a good day.”

Guests can get more details and RSVP now to join in the fun at this free community event at cbmm.org/WelcomeCenterGrandOpening.

“The quality of the Allegra concert was on par with music we’ve heard in concert halls in our former hometown of New York City”
– An audience member after the recent performance of the Allegra! Women’s Choir in Oxford.  

The Oxford concert was the second of two performances this past weekend, the first one presented in Easton.  This ensemble delivers a range of choral music not heard anywhere else, and performs it at an astonishingly skilled level.  I was deeply touched by their sensitive interpretation of a remarkable palette of choral music. To seek confirmation of my own opinion I asked several audience members to share with me what they took away from the concerts.  Powerful…Brilliant…Inspiring…Sublime are a few of the responses I received.  I observed people in the audience turning to one another with tears of appreciation, and mouthing, “wow”.  I felt all of that.

The ensemble focuses on repertoire by contemporary women composers.  Many texts are modern, but even those texts which aren’t, are exquisite settings both musically and poetically, and by turns exciting and tender.  The choir is a disciplined group of musicians who listen to and feed off one another, creating a soulful and balanced ensemble. As one audience member remarked, “The breathtaking resolutions from complex harmonies into perfect unison were sublime”.   The sound and sensation was so enveloping that another said, “The music was inside me – I was the music.”.  There were many more high compliments, but you get the idea.  Don’t pass up an opportunity to hear this extraordinary ensemble, based at the Allegro Music Academy here in Easton.

Amy Morgan is the founder and director of the Academy, and conductor of the women’s ensemble.  The Academy is a music conservatory offering many opportunities for music learning and involvement through its children’s choir, the community summer sing, and through private instruction for most instruments and voice.  It is dedicated to enriching the lives of our community.

Darrell Parsons is a professional musician, having retired to the Eastern Shore in 2018. He has had a distinguished career in opera and oratorio in Europe and the United States.

Twenty plays later, Michael Whitehill still searches for the magic of community theatre, that moment when cast, script, and audience merges into a transcendent moment of shared experience…..or even fails to project the heart of the play beyond the stage.

After all, every moment of live theatre is an experiment performed by volunteers who willingly risk self-doubt to reach that moment of joy in their craft and the pleasure of drawing us into their story.

It takes an intuitive director like Whitehill to help community theatre actors discover their characters and how they move in concert to unfold a script into a live performance true to the author’s intent.

Church Hill Theatre’s God of Carnage is one of those plays seasoned directors love to get their hands on: it’s a high-wire act of four characters—husbands and wives— on a mission to solve an incident involving their children.

In fact, what is experienced is a complete devolution of manners and best intentions as they unmask their own painful issues. But don’t let the title fool you. The emotional bloodletting is a comedy, the way comedy can reveal our own truth and, in that moment of honesty, laugh out loud in recognition.

 The Spy recently talked with Michael White about God of Carnage and working as a director with actors.

This video is approximately six minutes in length. God of Carnage plays through November 19, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. For tickets and reservations, call 410-556-6003 or go here.

Although the standard classical music repertoire is vast, until recently much of the typical symphony orchestra playlist was dominated by greatest-hits masterworks by long-dead European composers with rock-star names – Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky. Although each of the three pieces performed by the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra Friday night in Rehoboth Beach (reprised this weekend in Ocean City and at Chesapeake College) were also composed by long-dead European composers – one that even the principal players who performed her overture had never heard of – it may as well have been a world premiere to those in attendance in the acoustically bright Epworth United Methodist Church sanctuary.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Never mind that it was written in 1873, the Overture in D major, Op. 43 by pioneering Swedish composer Elfrida Andree was new even to many players on stage before they began rehearsing it. (Full disclosure: I never heard of her before either.) Andree was considered pioneering largely because she was female. Women composers and conductors, such as herself, were a minority rarely recognized or even given a chance to publish or perform their works. Her thrilling overture fell well within the late Romantic idiom of the time, but with beautiful deviations. Surprising and lovely solos pop up throughout the piece, largely by woodwinds and French horn, led in the 43-player MSO ensemble by first flutist Mindy Heinsohn, first oboist Dana Newcomb, first clarinetist Jay Niepotter and first bassoonist Kari Shea.

In part because the woodwind section was so instrumental to this performance, Heinsohn, a 2004 Easton High School alum and graduate of the Yale School of Music and Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, was chosen to make opening remarks about the program before introducing concertmaster Kim McCollum, followed by the entrance of music director Michael Repper. He wasted no time diving into this remarkable rediscovery, which, besides the woodwind solos, is marked also by soaring first-violin melodies.

And that was just the first 20 minutes of the concert. The Symphonic Variations by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a promisingly mature piece for a composer who died in 1912 at the age of 37, came next. Inspired by an African-American poem, “I Am Troubled in Mind,” the variations flow from one into another without pause along a theme established by brass instruments, principally tuba, trombones and French horns, led by Zach Bridges, Jeffrey Gaylord and Michael Hall, respectively. Without the usual pauses between variations, the piece flows like a cascading river that helped make Coleridge-Taylor a trans-Atlantic superstar at a time when his racial identity might not have been widely known. (No Facebook or Instagram.) Posthumously, much of his music was not recognized then in the music industry and is no longer published. As a result, much of his work is new again in our time.

After intermission, Mendelssohn’s historically significant Symphony No. 5, better known as the “Reformation Symphony,” turns the concert program back to traditional classical music sources though not exactly in the greatest-hits category. Not that it is deficient as a masterwork, but it is on a once-controversial theme. Religious uprisings, even of centuries past, linger in the minds of future generations. The Reformation, of course, refers to the Protestant revolt against Catholic hegemony, particularly in Europe.

The four-movement symphony proclaims which side Mendelssohn is on with a salute to Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation widely credited as author of the hymn translated from German into “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The opening Andante, appropriately solemn and contemplative, gives way to a joyful and exuberant second movement Allegro Vivace, as if celebrating the Reformation to come, though it had already advanced 300 years earlier with the “Augsburg Confession” enumerating Lutheranism articles of faith. The third-movement Andante offers a melodic respite from controversy that melds without pause into the full orchestra, fourth-movement statement of resolve and determination with a glory-be finish, which left some in the audience hesitant, at first, to offer a standing ovation. Was that three or four movements?

No matter, the “Reformation Symphony” was a fitting conclusion to a greatest-hits medley of gems many of us have never heard before. Hopefully, it’s part of an accumulating trend. The Metropolitan Opera has been trying to recruit new, younger audiences by staging works by living artists on contemporary themes. Credit Repper and the MSO for unearthing great music by composers whose work has been buried by centuries-old racial and gender biases. Bravo.

Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra

Opening concert, Nov. 3, Rehoboth Beach, followed by concerts 3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 4, Ocean City Performing Arts Center, and Sunday, Nov. 5, Todd Performing Arts Center, Chesapeake College, Wye Mills. midatlanticsymphony.org