Holiday Pops! Fort Wayne and northern Indiana’s most beloved orchestral music tradition comes around but once a year. 

This time, the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Orchestra is bringing us eight more performances of two concert programs of everybody’s holiday favorites. 

From light classics and rousing themes from holiday movies, to jazz and gospel takes on classic carols and hymns, and even some tap dancing, the orchestra’s back to thrill us with soul-stirring music spanning hundreds of years in the grandest of styles. It’s guaranteed to delight thousands of families, including yours.

Spreading the love

The first of these, the “run-out” productions which is performed in four cities, consists of the 70-piece orchestra led by conductor Troy Webdell and features Fort Wayne singer Stephanie Carlson. 

In fact, they already presented a performance on Nov. 17 in Bluffton. They’ll be in Warsaw on Dec. 8 and Albion on Dec. 9. 

These family concerts in high school auditoriums are free, and they’re always packed out.

The five performances of the “hometown” concert extravaganza at Auer Performance Hall at Purdue University Fort Wayne, which are ticketed with reserved seats, run Dec. 14-17. 

Holiday Pops at the Auer is led by musical director Andrew Constantine and features internationally renowned gospel and jazz singer Dee Daniels, the 70-piece orchestra, 34 singers of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Chorus, 30 singers in the Fort Wayne Children’s Choir, the Fort Wayne Dance Collective’s four tap dancers, Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus, and possibly a partridge in a pear tree, all coordinated by stage director Shelby Lewis.

The cozy and intimate Auer Performance Hall seats only 1,500, and these are going to sell fast.

Webdell and Carlson will return to lead the orchestra in the final ticketed performance of their “run-out” at the sumptuous Honeywell Center in Wabash on Dec. 19.

Featured singers

All this has been explained to us by the one person at the nexus of this festive, yet intense, music-making. 

He doesn’t wave the baton or take center stage, but everybody I’ve talked to agrees he’s the … man: Adrian Mann — the Philharmonic’s principal bass player. 

It’s the 80th season of the orchestra, and Mann has been with them an astonishing 51 years. He’s also the orchestra’s resident composer and arranger in addition to being their librarian. 

The Holiday Pops concerts, of course, feature pieces by more famous composers and arrangers that are performed far and wide, but they will also include several of Mann’s own arrangements, custom-made for the Philharmonic. Mann pours his creative passion into the music; when he speaks, he’s calm and measured.

“We didn’t have Holiday Pops as a recurring concert until probably the late ’80s,” said Mann, and of course he’s been a part of every production long before Constantine took the helm in 2009.

Orchestras have always offered holiday music, but the concept of Holiday Pops began with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops orchestra in the 1940s, Mann said. 

With the Philharmonic, you’ll hear the most iconic holiday pops hit, “Sleigh Ride,” with its cantering melody, woodblocks making the clip-clop of hooves, and that indelible trumpet flourish that sounds like a whinnying horse. It sounds like music from the 1800s, but it was written by Leroy Anderson in 1948 for the Boston Pops.

Mann enjoys writing “tailor-made” arrangements for Carlson, mostly in a pop-jazz 1960s style. 

“This is the fourth season that she’s sung with us,” Mann said. “Each year, I’ve usually done two or three new arrangements for her of particular Christmas songs that she really likes.”

At the Auer, Daniels will be front and center on several pieces. 

I checked in with conductor Caleb Young (who won’t be appearing this season) about working with her. 

“Dee Daniels is a world-class artist that sings so many different styles,” he said. “It’s going to be something that’s very fresh to this show. We haven’t had a jazz or gospel singer with us before on this program. With Dee, the orchestra will be playing full-on jazz charts with jazz brass and a drum set wailing away.”

Daniels is showcasing a number of traditional Christmas carols from contemporary pops arranger Jeff Tyzik. 

“Jeff is an institution,” Young said. “All of his arrangements are just complete showstoppers.”

Night of timeless music

This will be the first Philharmonic Holiday Pops in the Auer. 

“We’re definitely looking forward to the great acoustics in the Auer,” said Mann, who has performed there many times. “We’ll have the chorus in the choir loft right behind us.”

The orchestra is premiering Mann’s new arrangement of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and playing a piece he wrote in 1998, Lightsongs, a medley of eight traditional Hanukkah songs for the choir that mixes English, Hebrew, and Yiddish. 

Mann is particularly excited about the Children’s Choir singing “Jing-A-Ling, Jing-A-Ling,” made famous by the Andrews Sisters in the 1940s.

The Philharmonic is beloved for performing film score music, and a huge crowd-pleaser is the suite from the 2004 movie Polar Express by Alan Silvestri. They’ll also do two songs of John Williams’ from 1990’s Home Alone.

Traditional sacred music is woven throughout both programs. Highlights are Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Adolphe Adam’s “O Holy Night,” and a stunning orchestral arrangement of contemporary choral composer Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium.”

And after the Pops concerts, don’t miss an enduring tradition, the performance of Handel’s sacred oratorio Messiah at Auer Performance Hall on Dec. 22, when conductor Benjamin Rivera leads a smaller contingent of the orchestra with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic Chorus. Dutch soprano Josefien Stoppelenburg, Fort Wayne’s alto Ashlee Bickley, tenor Cameo Humes, and baritone Ryan Cox, down from Chicago, are featured soloists.

The Philharmonic, with more than 140 musicians and performers, fills these concerts with more music than we’ve got room to describe, but they’re all here to bring you and your family holiday cheer. They all hope to see you there.