New choir and new elements coming to the high school’s winter concert

The annual Wareham High School winter concert is taking the stage Thursday, Dec. 11 at 6 p.m. where many of the school’s music ensembles will showcase their talents in new ways during this nutcracker themed event.

The concert will be held at Wareham High School, 7 Viking Drive, and leading up to the show, junior and tenor saxophone player Donovan Leonardi said this is the most prepared for a concert he feels he has been.

“We’ve already played a lot of these songs before so we mostly know what we are getting ourselves into,” Leonardi said. “Now we’re getting really into a lot of the finer details in the music that we didn’t really do before.”

Attendees can expect to hear a wide variety of music but like every winter concert, there will be plenty of holiday classics.

“A lot of people have been playing these songs for a couple years and I think this is the best we’ve sounded in awhile,” he said.

This year’s concert is also going to have two new elements; stage design and the high school’s new chamber choir will perform.

Junior singer and instrumentalist Willow Hegarty said the set design element will have a variety of transitions to swap out decorations inspired by the classic holiday ballet, “The Nutcracker.”

“We’re going to go through the ballroom and a cozy at home in a winter storm set and all that kind of stuff,” she said.

The show will also be the chamber choir’s debut which Wareham High School music director Jason Roth said is a group composed of his most advanced singers.

“I’m really looking forward to how [the chamber choir] does,” he said.

In total, six different ensembles will perform on Thursday and Roth said many of his students are in multiple different groups.

“I just love the passion and the enthusiasm in the music program — it’s a very shared passion,” he said.

In recent years, Roth said more of his students are branching out and joining other ensembles as a result of the shared passion for music in the program.

“I have kids that come up to me and say ‘hey I want to learn an instrument or I want to take another music class what have you got he said,’” he said. “I said to one of my students ‘have you thought about joining chorus’ and then they tried and realized they really liked it.”