Arts & Entertainment
Sounds of The Season Featured at Burdett Mansion
Living History Guild Singers perform against backdrop of holiday decorations.
Listeners filled the parlor and dining room of a historic Woburn home, decorated for the holidays.
The performance began. The “musical journey through the centuries” included the “Cherry Tree Carol” and “Holly Tree Carol” and “Boar’s Head Carol”—and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”
The Living History Guild Singers—vocalists Clare Hurley, Donna Nagle, Maureen Vallis and Darlene Wigton and, on upright base, Wolfram Neff—performed. Then they led a sing-along.
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After the performance, some guests toured the Victorian-style Burdett Mansion, built in 1880, the home of the .
Two members of the guild singers are also members of the historical society, Hurley told the audience: she and Wigton. Since the summer, the society has used the parlor for exhibits, from baseball to school days, Hurley said, and a guild performance. The next exhibit, she said, will be on the history of Woburn veterans.
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Before the hour-long concert started Sunday evening, audience member Kathy McQuilkin from Burlington told Woburn Patch that she and her husband, Larry, came to the concert because she loves historical instruments and attends many historical society events. Nagle plays recorder and guitar; Vallis, bodhran, an Irish drum; and Wigton, guitar.
The McQuilkins also came for another reason, Kathy said: she’d never been inside the society’s restored quarters.
Likewise, Eric Crosson and his wife, Hang, brought her parents, Robert and Mary Alice Crosson, who are visiting from Seattle. Eric had never been in the house before, he said.
The historical society moved in in June, 2010.
Guests ooh’d and aah’d as they examined house features, like the delft tiles around the fireplace in the foyer.
Between the house, decorations, musical selections and the singers in the dress of an earlier time, a guest walking in to the house might have felt like he or she had stepped back into a Christmas celebration more than a century ago.
