Upcoming Events

Orchid Isle Orchestra will present its annual holiday concert at 4 p.m. Dec. 16 at the East Hawaii Cultural Center in Hilo.

OIO will present “Something Simple” for the holidays, which will include pieces from Benjamin Britten’s “Simple Symphony,” the Beatles’ “Something,” “Simple Gifts,” plus music from Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto IV and Corelli’s Christmas Concerto.

Britten wrote four movements, all with alliterating titles for string orchestra: “Boisterous Bourrée,” “Playful Pizzicato” (plucking the strings), “Sentimental Saraband” and “Frolicsome Finale.” “Something” and “Simple Gifts” are arrangements for string orchestra by OIO artistic director Cathy Young and Renata Bratt, respectively.

Featured soloists in the first movement of the Bach Brandenburg IV are flutists Susanella Noble, Cheryl Shine and violinist Young. The three women have played together in the Kamuela Philharmonic Orchestra for more than a decade.

This will be Noble’s, Shine’s and Young’s first performances with OIO.

Noble is a graduate of the University of Denver. She studied flute with master teachers/flutists in France and toured the country, but is happy to perform, teach and arrange music here in Hawaii.

Shine started flute lessons as a public elementary school student in Connecticut. Despite her love of music, as an adult she didn’t play much for many years until she took up lessons again with Noble.

Young founded OIO in 2006. She teaches privately and in group classes, where students learn violin, viola, cello and piano. Her two children learned to play violin, and continue to contribute to OIO when available. Young’s students will be featured throughout the concert.

Corelli Concerto soloists are OIO violinists Jeanette Gilbert and Mark Caudill and cellist Ina Klasner.

This year marks Gilbert’s third year performing with OIO. She studied violin from fourth grade through high school in Chicago.

“I am grateful to Cathy Young for encouraging me to get back to my violin and for challenging my musical comfort levels,” Gilbert says. “The last time I played classical music seriously was in high school.”

Caudill grew up in the Boston area, learning to play his grandmother’s violin in youth orchestra. He studied fiddling with Jon Singleton in Charlotte, N.C., toured for five years with the band Cantiga and now teaches math and physics at St. Joseph School in Hilo.

Klasner is a senior at Hilo High School. She studies cello at Young Music Studio and is in her sixth year. She recently auditioned and was invited to perform with the Hawaii All-State Orchestra. The orchestra will meet on Oahu for a weekend and perform a concert on Jan. 20, 2019.

The OIO concert starts with “pre-orchestra” music by Bach, Carl Maria von Weber, Handel and Seitz. At the end, audience members are invited to sing along while OIO accompanies you in some holiday favorites. Walter Greenwood and Cathy Young conduct.

The concert is free; donations will benefit Orchid Isle Orchestra, East Hawaii Cultural Center and more string music education.

For additional information, call Young at 982-9307.

East Hawaii Cultural Center is located at 141 Kalakaua St. in Hilo.

Volcano Art Center is pleased to announce the return of Jazz in the Forest.

The popular jazz performance series returns for a special Christmas concert at 5:30 p.m. Saturday (Dec. 8) at VAC’s Ni‘aulani Campus in Volcano Village and will feature Jean Pierre Thoma and the Jazztones with Jeannine Guillory, playing Christmas favorites and original compositions.

An acclaimed vocalist in Hawaii, Guillory’s background in jazz, reggae, pop and rhythm and blues lend to a strong versatile sound and energy that gets her audience and peers alike to stand up and applaud her amazing voice and on stage presence. She is a “must see” if you see her name on a billboard.

Guillory has performed at venues throughout Europe, South America and the United States. Stage performances include the renowned Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland and the Big Island Jazz Festival. She is a former vocalist with the internationally-known reggae/jazz group Groundation, which continues to tour the globe.

Thoma is a world-traveled professional musician on flute, saxophone, clarinet and piano, with experience throughout America, France, Japan, India and Israel. He has two master’s degrees in music and has been a public and private school teacher, as well as a member of numerous jazz and classical ensembles, such as the Maui and Marin symphonies. Now a music teacher in Hilo at The Pacific Academy of Music and at Kukuau Studio, he lives in Hilo.

Tickets for this special concert are $25 or $20 for VAC members. Ticketholders will be able to purchase beer and/or wine, as well as pupus. Tickets are available at www.volcanoartcenter.org, at VAC’s administration office in Volcano Village and at the VAC Gallery in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park.

The last day to purchase tickets online is Friday. After that, tickets will be sold at the gallery and at the door if they are not sold out. Tickets will be held at will call the day of the show or you may pick them up from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. at the administration office any day before the show.

The Ni‘aulani Campus is located at 19-4074 Old Volcano Road in Volcano Village.

For more information, visit www.volcanoartcenter.org.

The University of Hawaii at Hilo Japanese Student Association will present “Sound of Peace: Before and During WWII in Hawaii,” featuring movies and music, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at in the large lecture room, UCB100, and the Campus Plaza.

The event, which honors Japanese peacemakers (such as nisei Shigeo Yoshida) in Hawaii in 1941, includes a lecture with movies about the peace movement between the nations before and during World War II, as well as information about the Hawaii Morale Section during the war and Takarazuka Revue (Takarazuka Kagekidan), a Japanese all-female musical theater troupe (40 dancers and singers). The troupe performed in Hawaii and the U.S. to promote Japan-U.S. friendship in 1939, when the conflicts between the nations were getting worse.

A film documentary also will be shown. “The First Battle: The Battle for Equality in War-Time Hawaii” details nisei who were fighting against discrimination and war in Hawaii after the Japanese Imperial Navy attacked the U.S. base at the Pearl Harbor in 1945.

The movie focuses on what happened in Hawaii before and during WWII. The movie shows why Japanese people were treated very differently in Hawaii and the mainland U.S. before and during the war. About 120,000 mainland U.S. Japanese were sent to internment camps, but fewer than 3,000 Japanese were arrested and sent to camps in Hawaii.

Masafumi Honda, the program director of Japanese Studies in the Department of Languages at UH-Hilo, explains that Japanese immigrants (issei) and their children (nisei) have built a community in which different ethnic groups could coexist since the first Japanese immigrants (gannenmono) came to Hawaii in 1868 despite discrimination and hardship caused by the war between Japan (issei’s home country) and the U.S. (nisei’s home country).

There also will be a musical show at the Campus Plaza showcasing a peace concert by Asuka Horiuchi, a former Takarazuka singer from Japan, pianist Natsuko Uchida and flute player Yumi Asakawa. Local music groups, Taishji Taiko club and Okinawa Koto club, will join the concert.

Finally, there will be giant calligraphy display at UCB 100 and Campus Plaza.