Faculty to play concert of Valentine's Day favorites

Southeast Missouri State University's Patrick Rafferty and Laura Ross will join Erika Beasley for an evening concert of favorite Valentine's Day songs. With songs from Journey, The Beatles and many more artists, this will be a concert to cuddle up to with your sweetheart. This Valentine's serenade will be at 7:30 p.m., Feb. 14, in the Robert F. and Gertrude L. Shuck Music Recital Hall.

The concert will be divided in three sections with each section holding its own personality. The first section will feature solo Spanish guitar pieces performed by Rafferty. Rafferty has been teaching applied guitar and guitar literature for Southeast's guitar studies program since the spring of 2010.

The second section of the concert will feature Ross, who is the oboe instructor at Southeast. Ross and Rafferty have performed several duets together over the past couple of years. With Rafferty's guitar skills and Ross's oboe talent, the duo calls themselves "Double Fret."

"We call ourselves a classical crossover duo because we're both classically trained but none of the [repertoire] we play is classical," Rafferty said. "We deal with a lot of folk tunes, a lot of very up-tempo, pretty exciting stuff."

The final selection will include "Double Fret" featuring special guest vocalist, Beasley. This section of the concert is designed to have the audience tapping their toes, as the three perform their own arrangements of popular love songs.

"The vocal set is pretty much all songs people know. We're doing 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand' by The Beatles," Rafferty said. "We're doing 'Open Arms' by Journey. We're doing 'My Funny Valentine,' the jazz standard. We're doing some Patsy Cline love songs and tune from Show Boat called, 'Can't Help Lovin' That Man of Mine.'"

Rafferty practicing his guitar. Photo by Kristen Trambley

Rafferty and Beasley performed a similar concert in 2012. They were unable to do a Valentine's Day concert last year, so Rafferty began planning this year's Valentine's Day concert last summer. The three performers decided on the set of songs in December and began rehearsing in early January.

With Rafferty and Ross teaching at Southeast but living in St. Louis and Beasley living locally, they find it difficult to rehearse in person but have been rehearsing individually once or twice a week.

"We've been using technology," Rafferty said. "Meaning that we make recordings and send them to each other so we can rehearse."

A lot of songs went into consideration while choosing what pieces to incorporate into this concert. The main goal was to find songs that fit into a Valentine's theme.

"We had a whole bunch of songs picked out," Rafferty said. "We were going to do songs from stuff by Prince, and some things just didn't work out."

After deciding what songs will be in the concert, Rafferty is confident that this performance will have something to offer to everyone.

"The coolest thing about the program is that it has a huge amount of variety -- from standard classical [repertoire] to songs from The Beatles and Journey," Rafferty said. "So I think there is definitely something for everyone in this program. It's going to be pretty wide-ranging."