On Nov. 22, the Robert Frost poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” will serve as the inspiration for the Sinfonietta Pops Orchestra’s first Christmas Concert, which will also be the orchestra’s first concert at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College (SMWC). The concert, which is free and open to the public, will take place on Saturday, November 22, at 3 p.m. in the Cecilian Auditorium, of the SMWC Music Conservatory building. Several SMWC students and faculty members will participate in the concert as instrumentalists and vocalists.

SMWC serves as the home base of operations for the Sinfonietta Pops Orchestra, and James Chesterson, music director of the Sinfonietta Pops Orchestra, said he appreciates the many contributions that the SMWC Music and Theatre Department has made to this program. He also expresses his thanks to the SMWC Office of Conferences and Non-Credit Programs for their continued support. For more information about the concert, call 812-535-6440 or 812-466-2755.

The most famous Christmas Carol ever composed, “Silent Night,” will be sung by R. Ryan Endris. Endris is currently teaching music education, choral methods, and conducting classes as well as directing the Madrigal Singers and Chorale at SMWC. He is a graduate of Indiana University with a bachelor’s degree in music education and a master of music degree in choral conducting. He is also an alumnus of the Indiana University Singing Hoosiers.

Michael Boswell teaches voice, language diction, and music history at SMWC and is active as a soloist and chorister. He has performed throughout much of the United States, frequently recording with the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, a small professional choral ensemble based in Santa Fe New Mexico. He received his master of music degree in voice from Indiana State University (ISU). Boswell will sing a Mark Hayes arrangement of “Away in a Manger” that also incorporates the “Normandy Carol” and the “Cradle Song.”

Endris and Boswell will be accompanied by Ronald Maurey, who is also a member of the music faculty at SMWC. Maurey teaches applied and class piano, coaches singers and serves as accompanist in the Department. Of Music and Theatre. Maurey is a 1983 graduate of Indiana State University and also teaches privately from his home studio in Brazil.

The string section of the Sinfonietta Pops Orchestra will be featured in the Leroy Anderson composition “Suite of Carols for String Orchestra,” which includes some imaginative arrangements of such familiar songs as “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “The Wassail Song.”

Dr. Sheron Dailey, emerita professor of communication at ISU will be the narrator for this concert, which will be filled with familiar and not so familiar Christmas songs and carols. Besides her numerous academic accomplishments and awards, Dailey has earned a reputation as a performer, reading and narrating at events as diverse as reading from Shakespeare’s plays for “Shakespeare and Music” with the Columbia Missouri Symphony Orchestra and Choir and reciting poetry at the Vigo County Public Library “My Favorite Poems” program. She was also the narrator for “Peter and the Wolf” with the Terre Haute Symphony Orchestra. In addition to narrating the program, Dailey will read the famous New York Sun 1897 editorial, “Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus.”