dCommunity Church at Tellico Village continued its concert series Sunday with 14-year-old “prodigy” concert pianist Mayuki Miyashita of Maryville.

The Rev. John Orr, minister of music, founded the concert series three years ago to provide Loudon County with quality performances close to home.

“It’s something that other churches do and that I’ve done in other churches where I’ve worked,” Orr said. “And it’s just a nice way to kind of serve the community. We have this big, nice building that gets used on Sunday mornings, and this is a way to use it for other things that allow the community to come together and hear great music and see some things that they might not see.


“In our particular case, it allows us to bring groups here rather than everybody having to drive to Knoxville to hear good concerts,” he said.

The series, which began in September, concludes May 2 with the Raleigh Ringers.

Jon Martin, church member and former executive director of the Knoxville Choral Society, said he watched Miyashita win the Young Classical Musicians Competition about two years ago.

“She just blew the socks off of that place,” Martin said. “... I’m assuming, and I don’t know this for a fact, but I would expect she’s going to play the entire concert without a piece of music. I mean she is unbelievable, and her speciality is speed. The piece that she played to win our young classical musicians contest must have had 50,000 notes in it in five minutes or four minutes. It was just unbelievable.”

Martin and his wife have season passes to the concert series. The church’s 55-member choir acts as the “core group that comes to the concerts.”

He estimated that 1,200 people attended the Christmas concert. With the church boasting 1,400 congregants, he speculated that a majority of guests were not members of Community Church.

“It is our major outreach to the community,” Martin said. “... We knew darn good and well that a lot of those people had either never been in our church or had been there a time or two but they certainly weren’t members. So that was the classic example of how successful this outreach has been.”

Orr attributed the series’ success partially to the donor drive the church holds each summer to raise funds for the program. While some concerts are ticketed, others remain free to the public depending on the expense of the artist. Ticketed performances typically cost no more than $10 per person.

Initially, series entertainers were primarily local groups and collegiate choirs, but more nationally known artists such as The American Boychoir School and Ballet Magnificat have graced the stage.

All shows this year have been well attended, and Orr hopes community members have the same response to upcoming performances.

“I hope it continues to grow and that we’re able to continue to offer world class groups that come through that people know about and hear about and listen to on the radio or buy records from and see on TV and things like that, and that would allow us to keep it a really high quality concert series, and from all I can tell, that’s what’s going to happen,” Orr said.

“It’s just good for our community in Loudon County. There’s so many times we have to drive to Knoxville to do something,” Orr said. “We have to drive to Maryville or some place like that, and I just think Loudon County ought to have something that’s just as interesting and high quality as these other places here because we’ve certainly got people who support it and are interested in it, and we have a venue like the Community Church that’s long enough with the right kind of technology to hold these sorts of events. That was our goal to bring our community together around things like this.”

For more information, visit online at http://www.tellicochurch.com.