Flagler Auditorium’s New Season Launches with St. Augustine Orchestra, and a Special Violinist, Sunday

When Scott Gregg made his debut performance at Flagler Auditorium in 1995 with the Jacksonville Symphony Orchestra, he was wearing a bright red suit and elfish cap with furry white trim, and a faux white beard.

A mere month earlier, Gregg had taken a post as the JSO’s Music Director for Education, and as Music Director and Principal Conductor of the symphony’s youth orchestras. Shortly before the JSO’s performance at Flagler Auditorium (which last year rebranded itself as the Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center), Gregg’s superiors came to him with an assignment.




“They said, ‘Hey, our Santa Claus for the Christmas concert has bagged on us and we need a Santa – here’s the suit, get up on stage!’ ” Gregg recalled.

Santa Gregg, who earned his undergraduate degree in music theory and composition, and a minor in astrophysics, from Harvard College, didn’t conduct or perform on violin. Instead, he said, “I was the special guest star for the symphony, so I was walking down the aisle passing out Christmas presents.

“I was probably the key component of that performance,” Gregg added with a chuckle. “You don’t have to hold an instrument to be the star of the show.”

Flash forward to October 2024, and Gregg, who has been the artistic director and conductor of the St. Augustine Orchestra since 2016, is again playing the role of Santa – metaphorically this time, and with a huge assist from the Fitzgerald’s Arts in Education program.

When the St. Augustine Orchestra performs at 2 p.m. Sunday (Oct. 27), at the Fitz – a rescheduled date forced by Hurricane Milton – children accompanied by their parents or supervising adults will be admitted free. But there’s more: Parents accompanied by their children, or supervising adults (up to two) accompanied by children will also be admitted free and not have to pay the $25 ticket.




As Amelia Fulmer, director of the Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center, put it, “We’re going to scholarship the adults as well.”

In theory, the 1,000 seats of the Fitz, a nonprofit entity located on the campus of Flagler Palm Coast High School, could be packed to capacity and the performing arts center would end up with $0 in ticket sales if the audience is composed entirely of families.

“We would still be OK because we are funding the concert from our Arts in Education program,” said Fulmer, who served 16 years as director of choral activities and as a guitar instructor at the high school before becoming director of the Fitz in 2019.

One of the goals of the performance, Fulmer said, “is to get young people to the concert” to expose them to orchestral classical music, and to provide them an educational experience. Orchestral music (with the apples-and-oranges exception of the Flagler Youth Orchestra) is currently a rarity in these parts. The concert also will give budget-strapped families – and not just the kids – a chance to hear a full-sized classical orchestra, perhaps for the first time, Fulmer added.

There are other goals and benefits, both short-term and long-term, which are riding on the virtually free SAO concert that will come early in the Fitz’s busy 2024-2025 season. Those goals and benefits could affect the Flagler County community, the local arts scene, area music students, the performing arts center and the SAO itself. That’s according to Fulmer, Gregg and Janie Ruddy, a newly elected member of the Flagler County School Board, a former middle grades math and science instructor for Flagler schools, and a violinist with the St. Augustine Orchestra for the past five years.




When the SAO, which lacks its own permanent performing space in St. Augustine and plays at high schools, churches and other venues across Northeast Florida, reached out to the Fitzgerald to rent its theater for a concert, Fulmer and the performing arts center governing board saw an opportunity they didn’t want to slip away.

The SAO, composed of more than 60 volunteer musicians, is the type of ensemble that many people, including Gregg, call a “community orchestra,” but that term often belies the dedication, training and experience of the players who perform in them.

Flagler County hasn’t hosted such an orchestra concert “in so, so long,” Fulmer said, noting that the now-defunct Palm Coast Arts Foundation for many years brought the Jacksonville Symphony, a professional ensemble, to town for its annual Picnic and Pops concert.

Also, she added, the Fitzgerald “has brought major orchestras here before, but it’s been quite a few years, and those shows weren’t profitable. I expressed wanting the St. Augustine Orchestra to play here, but I didn’t feel we had the base of listeners yet for the SAO to be able to charge tickets and get what they needed to support their orchestra, and I didn’t want them ending up with a loss.”

The Fitzgerald’s governing board “has money that we reserve for arts education” Fulmer added. Those funds provide support to the high school’s art, dance, drama and music teachers and students, as well as an arts grant program that supports county-wide organizations.

However, Fulmer added, “Part of our mission also is to create educational and cultural experiences, because if we don’t they won’t continue to exist. Having an orchestra is something that every community should have at least once a year.”

The SAO concert is “one little baby step” in piquing the interest of the area’s arts and culture patrons, and the entire community, to achieve that goal, Fulmer said.

Using Arts in Education funds, “we are paying the orchestra an artist fee just like we would professional musicians that tour, and we’re doing it that way so that we are able to give free tickets away,” Fulmer said.

Free tickets are available for families, but they must call the Fitz box office at 386-437-7547 to reserve seats. General admission tickets are $25 in honor of Palm Coast celebrating the 25^th anniversary of its incorporation this year.

“We usually bring a lot of rock ’n’ roll and lot of oldies, and we love all those things too,” Fulmer said, noting that this season’s schedule includes Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits fame, Crystal Gayle, Lee Greenwood and tributes to the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, Abba, Elvis, Motown and many other classic artists.




“But the dream and the goal is to have a balanced schedule because we’re supposed to serve the arts,” she said. “We’re very happy that the St. Augustine Orchestra is excited about the program they’re bringing and we’re fortunate they’re coming. We’ll be more fortunate if they continue to come just 30 miles south occasionally and play in our neck of the woods.”

What Gregg calls the SAO’s “peripatetic nature” is driven by two factors, he said: “The sheer fact of the community orchestra means that we draw our membership from a lot of places. We’ve got a few members from Palm Coast who drive up for rehearsals, and we’ve got a lot of members from Jacksonville. So we’ve got a lot of constituents across Florida, and part of our mission is to reach audiences in new places, especially places that don’t get exposure to a lot of the arts in their community.”

The second factor is that, “unlike a lot of the big arts groups that have their homes and you have to go to them,” the SAO doesn’t have an official home venue, Gregg said, “So we go where the venues are.”

As for the SAO making Palm Coast a more frequent part of its itinerary, “I’m not involved in those conversations,” said Gregg, who was born in Boston and also spent his formative years in Cleveland, Dallas, Washington D.C. and Baltimore. “I got a chance to tour the Fitzgerald a couple of years ago, and I was very impressed by the quality of the facility and the roster of acts and entertainment that had been lined up. So this will be my first time actually playing it. Everybody is very enthusiastic about making this appearance and I see no reason why we couldn’t make this a part of our regular schedule.”

Ruddy, the newly elected school board member, knows from personal experience that exposure to music can lead to immersion in music, which, she said, provides numerous benefits to students. Growing up in Niagara Falls, N.Y., Ruddy was 5 years old when she saw an orchestra concert while visiting her grandmother, “and I knew then that I wanted to play the violin.”

Her family moved to Tucson, Ariz., where every school had a strings program. “Of course I was like ‘I have to do this,’ ” said Ruddy, who will be performing publicly in Palm Coast for the first time on Oct. 27. “My mom tracked down a used violin in the newspaper classified ads and I remember thinking ‘Wow, they’re spending $50 on this instrument.’ ”

Her violin dreams were diminished when her family moved to Pennsylvania and the high schools there “shockingly” had no strings program. “I was the only violin lawyer in my entire class,” she said.

Ruddy took private lessons, performed well in state-level competitions, and took up the French horn to have the experience of playing in an ensemble with her high school’s marching band.




However, in college she decided to pursue healthcare administration. Later when she “got the teaching bug,” she went back to college for her middle grades science bachelor’s degree, and eventually she earned a master’s degree in educational technology.

Ruddy taught middle grades math and science for 13 years in Flagler and Cumberland County schools, and currently she works for n2y, a firm that creates learning programs for special education students.

“I wonder what would have happened if I had stayed with a school where they had a strings program,” Ruddy said.

Her inner violinist re-emerged five years ago when she joined the St. Augustine Orchestra after her three daughters, all veterans of the Flagler Youth Orchestra, had become older.

“Most parents agree that athletics in school is almost a non-negotiable, but so too are the arts,” Ruddy said. “When you participate in an instrument and learn music, which is like another language, and then you practice and get better and become part of a group, it shares teamwork. It challenges a different part of the brain. It gives a huge amount of self-confidence and is a way to express emotion. We need more things that kids can do that can’t be replaced by a hand-held device.”

The Concert Program

The St. Augustine Orchestra website says that each of the orchestra’s concerts features a theme that aims to “inform, enlighten and entertain.” The theme of the SAO’s Fitzgerald concert is “Fiesta & Faith: A Journey from Celebration to Contemplation.”

The program on Sunday will include:

“Ritual Fire Dance” from El Amor Brujo (“Love, the sorcerer”), a ballet by Manuel de Falla.

Danzon No. 2 by Arturo Márquez.

Capriccio Espagnol, an orchestral suite based on Spanish folk melodies, composed by the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

Symphony No.5 – “Reformation” by Felix Mendelssohn.

“First, we want to entertain the audience, but also part of our mission is to fulfill the artistic needs of the musicians in the orchestra,” said Gregg, whose passion for astrophysics was trumped by music for the simple reason that, during his college days, music rehearsals and sky observations both happened at night.

“We’re all volunteers in the group, so they are constantly clamoring for new and varied repertoire to play, and the Mendelssohn was at the top of the list,” Gregg said. “Also, I wanted to include some Spanish-influenced music, which frankly we should be doing because we’re the orchestra of the oldest town in in the U.S., with its strong Spanish leanings.




“Tying those two together, from fiesta to faith, was a little bit of a construct for me. You have a great Saturday night and then a penitent Sunday morning (laughs).”

New at the Fitz for 2024-2025: more headliners, upgraded sound system, more parking

Patrons of the Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center this season will discover 130 more parking spaces, a new $300,000 sound system, and more headliners – Peter Noone, Crystal Gayle, Lee Greenwood, the Gatlin Brothers and others – along with the always popular tribute acts.

“We have a very balanced season, but it’s a riskier season,” Fulmer said. That’s because the aforementioned headliners and others – such as the Kingdom Choir from London (who performed at the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle) and singer-actor Mandy Gonzalez (of “Hamilton” and “Wicked” fame) – typically demand a higher artist fee, even as their acknowledged star power and popularity may not translate into decent ticket sells in any one particular market.

Conversely, the tribute bands coming to the Fitz – including those performing the music of the Beatles, Abba, David Bowie, Motown, Olivia Newton-John, the Doobie Brothers and others – “have a following,” Fulmer said. “If you have a tribute, you’re going to sell all your tickets. We want to bring headliners and not always tributes, but the tributes end up paying for the headliners.”

For the Fitzgerald’s season lineup, go online at flaglerauditorium.org.

The Fitz administration staff realized the venue needed to replace its 22-year-old sound system and its outdated technology when, in recent years, such acts as tributes to Queen and Whitney Houston brought in their own sound gear for their shows, Fulmer said.

The $300,000 cost of the new system was split 50-50 by the Flagler County school system and the auditorium governing board using revenue from ticket sales.

“Patrons are going to have a more spectacular experience,” Fulmer said. It’s not going to be louder – it’s more that you can feel the difference.”

Because orchestras, brass bands and a number of other large music ensembles typically perform “acoustic” or virtually acoustic – that is, they do not require powerhouse electrical amplification – the new sound system will not be utilized for the St. Augustine Orchestra’s Oct. 27 concert.

Instead, the Nov. 3 concert by Rumours ATL: A Fleetwood Mac Tribute will be the new system’s debut, Fulmer said.

The St. Augustine Orchestra will perform at 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 27, at the Fitzgerald Performing Arts Center, 5500 East Hwy. 100, Palm Coast (on the campus of Flagler Palm Coast High School). Tickets are free for children and their parents, and for children and up to two supervising adults. For free tickets, patrons must call the Fitz box office in advance at 386-437-7547 to reserve their seats. Regular tickets are $25 and are available online at flaglerauditorium.org, or at the box office from 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Monday-Friday and before showtime.