The Fall River Symphony Holiday Pops Concert will be Sunday, December 10th at 3:00 PM in the Jackson Arts Center at Bristol Community College. Tickets will be available at the door for $20 or can be purchased in advance from the FRSO, P. O. Box 9034, Fall River, MA 02720 for the reduced price of $15. Children and students are $5. Tickets can also be purchased on the Symphony website, fallriversymphonyorchestra.org. Refreshments will be served. For further information call Elizabeth Doherty, President of the Symphony Society at 508-678-2241 or email frsosocialmedia@gmail.com.
 
The concert will open with the Waltz of the Flowers from Tschaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. They will also play the Rimsky-Korsakov Christmas Eve Suite, a set of pieces from an opera written in the 1890’s, including fantastic beasts, Russian Christmas music and a ride on the devil’s back to the palace of the Tsar! With the South Coast Community Chorus they will play A Musicological Journey Through the Twelve Days of Christmas, by Ohio composer Craig Courtney, which turns the familiar carol about such unusual Christmas gifts as a partridge in a pear tree into a lesson in the history of Western music. It begins with a medieval Gregorian chant version of the carol and proceeds in 12 steps to the modern world. There also will be innovative arrangements of standards such as Do you Hear what I Hear, White Christmas and the First Noel, and they will end with Cambridge, MA Composer Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride, where all the children in the audience can come up on stage and help by ringing bells.