Special event showcases student talent

Quin Stevens gets nervous when she thinks about Thursday night.

She’ll be performing the prelude from J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 at An Evening of Fine Arts, a fundraiser for Kalispell Public Schools and Flathead Valley Community College. And even though Stevens has been playing and performing for years, the Glacier High School senior has butterflies.

“I’m so nervous,” she said. “I’m thankful [for the chance to perform]. I love things like this that promote the arts and get the community involved, and I’m thankful that I was chosen to be a part of this, too.

“But I’m so nervous. So nervous.”

Stevens is one of several Kalispell high school students who will perform or have art on display at Thursday’s event. An Evening of Fine Arts will showcase musicians, singers, actors, orators and visual artists from Flathead and Glacier high schools.

The district used to have a similar event that was sponsored by the Booster Club, Flathead High School choir director Kevin Allen-Schmid said.

“It was a cool format. We never do a show which has a little bit of everything” from every artistic medium, he said.

Eventually the Booster Club went a different direction; the group hosts an annual auction that is its primary fundraiser. Allen-Schmid suspects opening a second high school and duplicating the number of potential artists to showcase might have contributed to the event’s demise.

“With the splitting of the high schools, maybe it got a little bit difficult to coordinate all that,” he said.

The school district, school board and Kalispell Education Foundation, a nonprofit that provides grant money to teachers in Kalispell Public Schools, joined forces to bring back the event, he said. Proceeds will benefit the foundation and Flathead Valley Community College’s art program.

The evening will feature the best work of some of Kalispell’s most creative students.

“The idea of An Evening of Fine Arts is to promote excellence,” said Chuck Manning, chairman of Flathead High School’s art department. “We chose pieces that we felt were on the high end of the scale of student ability, pieces we felt we would represent the high schools the best.”

Between Flathead and Glacier high schools, art teachers selected 15 to 20 two-dimensional art pieces and five to 10 three-dimensional pieces for display at the event.

Jaryn Ravetto, a Flathead High junior, will have a sketch of a dancer at the show. The sketch shows the influence of music on dance, she said; music has been the theme of her art all year.

In Flathead’s International Baccalaureate art class, students select a theme to build on throughout the year, or for two years if they are in the program for that long.

Junior Elena Musz’s theme, dreams, led to the Impressionist-style painting she’ll have on display at the event. Sara Friedrich, a senior, painted a picture in the pointillist style on drinking and driving to illustrate her theme, the waste of a human life.

The themes give students a surprising amount of freedom in their work throughout the year, Musz said.

“You can kind of morph it. It grows, just like we grow as we do more art,” she said.

Singers from Flathead and Glacier will perform throughout the evening.

The cast of “The Pajama Game,” which will be performed at Flathead Feb. 17 through 19, will offer a sneak peak of a song from that musical. The Choral-Aires, Flathead’s select concert choir, will perform Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and may also sing a song with the Echoes, Glacier High’s select choir.

“We haven’t finalized the program, but they’ll sing, possibly together,” Allen-Schmid said.

He said he was looking forward to the event and was glad An Evening of Fine Arts had returned.

“I’m in the show biz myself, so we’re always looking for a place to perform,” he said.

Band and orchestra students from the schools will also be part of the show. Top speech and debate students, fresh from this weekend’s state tournament, will give selections. Actors from Glacier will perform a short selection.

The entire event will be emceed by students Quinn Maroney from Glacier and Emily Stoick from Flathead.

Despite her nerves, Stevens said she was looking forward to the event.

“I always like to take these opportunities. It builds my confidence,” she said.

In addition to playing with the Glacier High orchestra, Stevens takes private lessons and aims to practice for at least an hour a day. She said she fell in love with the cello in fifth grade and plans to continue playing all her life.

“It’s something I always want to be a part of. It’s like a lifestyle to me,” she said.

The event takes place at 6 p.m. Thursday in the community room at Flathead Valley Community College’s Arts and Technology Building. Chef Howard Karp and students from the college’s Culinary Arts program will provide appetizers and desserts.

Tickets are $40 each and are available at Bonelli’s Bistro, 38 First Ave. E. in Kalispell; the Hockaday Museum of Art; the main offices at Flathead and Glacier high schools; and on Kalispell Education Foundation’s website.

Individuals or businesses may sponsor the event for $250. Sponsors will be mentioned during the evening, placed in the program and will receive two tickets and two etched Riedel wine glasses.

For additional information, visit the foundation’s website, www.kalispelleducationfoundation.org.

Reporter Kristi Albertson may be reached at 758-4438 or at kalbertson@dailyinterlake.com.