The Fortuna Christmas Music Festival is slated for Dec. 8 at the River Lodge Conference Center, 1800 Riverwalk Drive, Fortuna. The music begins at 1 p.
m. with the Scotia Band, followed by the Fortuna High School Band at 1:45 p.m.
, the College of the Redwoods Jazz Band at 2:30 p.m. and the Partnership in Music Orchestra at 3:15 p.
m. The traditional “Messiah” singalong and “Silent Night” candlelight closing will end the program around dusk. Everyone is invited any time during the afternoon.
Admission is free. Santa Claus will be in attendance, and refreshments and baked goods will be available to purchase. Where Scotia Band is concerned, conductor Kenneth Ayoob envisions a program transporting the audience backward across time from the opening “Winterscape” by Gavin Lendt, which rearranges recognizable phrases of familiar seasonal tunes into a modernistic musical collage, to more familiar and traditional holiday fare.
The band will then perform a second, more hymn-like contemporary classic in “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Talllis” arranged by Jay Bocook. A very quiet piece, this band arrangement captures the timeless beauty and pastoral orchestration of the Ralph Vaughn-Williams original. In contrast, the breakneck “Petersburger Schlittenfartt” (“Petersburg Sleighride”) by Richard Eilenberg, describes a careening ride in a cozy sleigh pulled by a team of frenzied horses.
It features the “whip crack instrument,” or “slapstick” which makes a reali.
