PORT ANGELES — Irish tenor Anthony Kearns returns to the North Olympic Peninsula for a concert at 7 p.m. Saturday.
His performance in the Port Angeles High School auditorium, 304 E. Park Ave., is a fundraiser for the high school orchestra’s spring 2013 trip to Carnegie Hall in New York City.
OPUS, Orchestra Parents United for Students, is hosting the event. Seats range from $15 to $38.50 .
Concert tickets, as well as $10 special passes to a reception afterward, are on sale at Northwest Fudge and Confections, 108 W. First St. in Port Angeles; Pacific Mist Books, 121 W. Washington St. in Sequim; and at www.NWperformingarts.com.
(A $2 service charge is added to credit-card orders.)
Tickets also will be sold at the door Saturday.
Hailed as “Ireland’s finest tenor” by Irish ambassador Michael Collins, Kearns, 41, is the founding member of The Irish Tenors, who have performed all over the world for more than a decade.
He has won countless singing competitions and sung in operas — from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” to Bizet’s “Carmen” — across Europe and North America.
He also has performed at many memorial concerts for the victims of 9/11, sang at the funeral of President Ronald Reagan and performed “Amazing Grace” for 300,000 at the 2010 National Memorial Day parade in Washington, D.C.
Broad program
The singer and his longtime accompanist, Patrick Healy, will be playing Saturday with “the band,” as Kearns calls them: the high school’s Roughrider Orchestra.
Kearns will offer a mixed program: songs from Broadway musicals, a few comedy duets with Healy and “the Irish songs we’re known for.”
The Roughrider Orchestra will join him for selected works such as “Bring Him Home” from “Les Misérables” and “If I Loved You” from “Carousel.”
In addition, Erin Hennessey, the orchestra’s 17-year-old violinist and winner of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association competition, will step up to play “Danny Boy” with Kearns and Healy.
Healy is well-known in the music industry as an expert on Gilbert and Sullivan and takes the mic during concerts to regale the audience with droll tales of his life in “the business” while the tenor rests his voice between sets.
Nine years ago
Kearns was first invited to Port Angeles nine years ago by Lynnette Crouse, a fan who has since become the singer’s webmaster, and Ron Jones, director of the high school’s orchestra program.
They didn’t really expect him to come.
But he does a lot of fundraisers and decided Port Angeles’ music program was a worthy cause.
He has been coming back ever since: Saturday will be the tenor’s eighth solo concert in the school auditorium.
Jones is very appreciative of how Kearns and Healy have helped raise money for the school orchestra’s trips to Carnegie Hall.
Port Angeles High has sent student musicians there every four years since 1989.
In 2013, Jones plans to take more than 100 students to New York City on March 28 to rehearse for their Easter Sunday, March 31, performance in the storied hall.
