The wrap-up evening of the Estevan and District Music Festival was the opportunity for the star-studded event to focus on some of the best musical performers in the class of 2015.
The Hi-Lites concert and awards evening held in the Estevan Comprehensive School Cafetorium on March 30 enabled all award-winners to have their moment in the spotlight after a three-week stretch of adjudications in various city venues.
The evening included a parade of major and minor award winners including five musical acts that have been selected to represent the local region at the provincial festival slated to be in Saskatoon June 5 to 7.
The festival sponsors offered $11,600 in scholarships and awards for this year’s event and the Festival Committee president, Pam Dechief said the entry list this year was up by about 100 compared with last year’s.
“We also had about 80 per cent of them register online this year, which was a big help. It made it much more efficient,” said Dechief who has completed her third year at the helm of the committee.
Morgan Jones was one accomplished musician who reaped some of the major awards, including over $1,200 in scholarship cash for her skill with the flute and piano as well as an accompanist for others.
“Morgan received the scholarship for woodwind instruments and the open piano class, which was one of the major awards, the Andrist Award. She also captured the Doreene Inglis Memorial Award for accompaniment, as well as the Murray GM Award for multiple disciplines,” said Dechief.
Jones, along with Abbie Brokenshire (vocals- musical theatre); Al’s Music Studio Girls’ Choir, Matthew Grunert (trumpet), and Yongseong Jeon, (strings), were selected by the adjudicators to advance to the provincial competition.
The other outstanding award winners included Joshua Wade who performed with Brokenshire in the musical duet category. Brokenshire also captured major awards for best performance for the 17-and-under entrants and musical theatre.
Avery Dechief won the major award for individual speech art while Brooke Stepp was an outstanding finisher in the open piano category along with Jones.
The ECS senior band and the Lampman High School Band grabbed outstanding band performance awards as did the Estevan Junior Band (Grade 8).
Maisy Daoust and Mariah Warriner shared the outstanding vocal award this season while Grunert was the outstanding individual brass instrumentalist.
Mya Waloshin and Nathan Littlefield shared an outstanding piano performance award in the open category that earned them the Mary Murakami Memorial Award.
The speech art award for outstanding choral group, went to the Grade 4 class from Sacred Heart/Sacre Coeur School and the Outlanders earned another major vocal award as one of the best choruses in the festival.
The award presentations, over 150 of them, were interspersed with festival highlight performances that featured some of the best from the band and instrumental groupings, vocalists, piano and speech arts.
The 2015 Volunteer Award recipients this year were Stacy Grunert and Esther Bangsund.
“We were so happy to see the registrations back up over 700 again. It means more work for volunteers, but also means this is a popular event,” said Dechief.
The annual general meeting for the Estevan and District Music Festival Committee will be held on Sept. 9 beginning at 7:30 p.m. at Spruce Ridge School in Estevan.
“We always welcome new faces. This is a public meeting, and once again, we wrapped this one up in a successful way. And again, I have to say, with a great deal of enthusiasm, we could never pull this off without the support of all of our sponsors along with our volunteers,” Dechief said.
