Wharton Center brings MSU home for holidays

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Oh, there’s no place like home for the holidays — as long as Wharton Center is your home at 8 p.m. Saturday.

It’s time for the MSU’s annual Home for the Holidays concert, when the College of Music comes together to celebrate the season. The MSU Symphony Orchestra, the Men’s and Women’s Glee Club, the State Singers and the MSU Children’s Choir will take the stage in an event that rings with tradition.

Leon Gregorian, director of orchestras, is appreciative of the rich history Home for the Holidays has written for the MSU community.

“This has been going on for almost 25 years or so,” Gregorian said. “It wasn’t always called Home for the Holidays, but it was decided that it would be changed to Home for the Holidays because, after all, this is a home for 47,000 students and faculty. We really don’t have anything organized at this time of the season where we celebrate Christmas and Hanukkah and Kwanza and so on — so it’s nice to do it with all of that in mind in a surrounding that is so familiar to so many people from all over the world.”

Kristin Zaryski, director of the MSU Children’s Choir and a College of Music graduate, is looking forward to directing her first Home for the Holidays concert.

“I’m really excited,” she said. “It’s really a great performance for the community because of the variety. It’s nice to see children as young as fifth-graders perform as well as graduate students who are working on their doctorate degree. It’s great to see a full spectrum of talent like that.”

Although the size of the MSU Children’s Choir has been reduced from 55 to 26, Zaryski is optimistic about her group of singers.

“I think people will be pleasantly surprised to hear the fullness of the choir’s sound, the expression that they sing with and the excitement that they sing with,” Zaryski said.

Home for the Holidays will include the premiere of a new composition titled “Alfred Burt’s Christmas for Orchestra,” which was arranged by Earl Reisdorff, an emergency room physician at the Ingham Regional Medical Center. Reisdorff, who worked with professor of composition and music theory Charles Ruggiero on the arrangement, also is an accomplished jazz pianist and has written pieces for the MSU Children’s Choir and Lansing Symphony Orchestra, among others. Reisdorff’s arrangement features six of Burt’s Christmas carols, including “Star Carol,” which was performed by Simon & Garfunkel, “Some Children See Him” and “Caroling, Caroling.”

For Reisdorff, some of the joy in composing the piece came from the creative freedom he had.

“I’m a huge Christmas music buff,” Reisdorff said. “As a jazz pianist, I’ve always liked taking traditional standard Christmas music and varying it. I realized that no one had symphonically arranged Alfred Burt’s Christmas music and I thought it would be kind of interesting to arrange some of these carols.”

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