By Tom Gilchrist
Staff Writer
RICHVILLE — Singers and musicians will finish the weekend with a flourish Sunday night inside St. Michael’s Lutheran Church here, when about 104 performers put on the second Veterans Day program.
Admission is free and valet parking is available. Charles Chaveriat, St. Michael’s music director, will direct a 24-member orchestra and a 79-person choir as it plays 12 main numbers that are patriotic tunes, hymns or spiritual songs. Photographic images relating to the music will be projected on two screens in the church sanctuary, which seats about 900.
“The program has a lot of the old-favorite hymns, some with new melodies,” Chaveriat said. “(Audience members) wanted to be able to relate to it better after last year.”
Narrators will speak between songs during the program, and Chaveriat will ask the audience to participate in the event, where volunteers will take an offering, with donations going to the Wounded Warrior Project and to help cover some of the program’s costs.
The Wounded Warrior Project serves veterans and service members who incurred an injury, wound or illness relating to their military service on or after Sept. 11, 2001. The Project also serves those veterans’ or service members’ families.
More musicians and singers will perform in this year’s event than in last year’s first Veterans Day program at St. Michael’s. The performers represent about 12 area congregations.
“Last year we wanted to get this program off the ground and see if it would be accepted, and overwhelmingly they wanted to see something like that again,” Chaveriat said. “This year we’re really trying to produce a finished product.”
Singers and musicians will perform the national anthem, hymns such as “How Great Thou Art” and “Holy, Holy, Holy!” and “Rock of Ages,” and the American spiritual song “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”
St. Michael’s members wanted to reach out to the area with the first Veterans Day program last year, according to Chaveriat.
“As church members, we wanted to be more active in our community, and get other community members involved in something that was religious-based but it wasn’t in your face,” Chaveriat said. “As a singer, I had participated in something like this growing up in Milwaukee.”