Berkshire Symphony Performance

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WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. The Williams College Department of Music presents the Berkshire Symphony with director Andrew J. Kim in a performance titled, Opera Without Words on March 6, at 7:30 pm.
 
This event is free and open to the public. There are no reservations or ticketing.
 
This concert presents instrumental music from operas across time and musical traditions, drawing from Johann Strauss Jr.'s Overture to Die Fledermaus, Britten's Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes; Richard Wagner's Vorspiel und Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde; and Joseph de Bologne's L'Amant Anonime.
 
According to a press release:
 
The Berkshire Symphony is a truly unique model for an orchestra. Consisting of Williams College faculty and other professional musicians sitting side-by-side with auditioned students, the ensemble presents high level performances for the College and the Berkshires community at large while fostering immersive learning experience for the students in a professional setting. The faculty and students are able to develop close mentorships through playing next to each other, and rehearsals become a fertile ground for growth in which students learn nuances of ensemble playing and collaborative music-making.
 
The orchestra presents four concerts a year, each through four rehearsals on preceding Tuesdays and Thursdays. It aims to share a diverse set of repertoire that represents wide-ranging cultural backgrounds as well as time periods, including music written by living composers. The orchestra also serves as a liaison between the College and its broader community as an important performing arts organization in the Berkshires, helping to connect everyone through music.
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Mount Greylock Schools Draft Budget Sees Double-Digit Percentage Hikes for Towns

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock Regional School Committee on Tuesday began consideration of whether it wants to send its member towns fiscal year 2027 assessments that are 12 to 13 percent higher than the bills Lanesborough and Williamstown paid for the current school year.
 
The committee held a special meeting with a single item on the agenda: the draft FY27 budget prepared by the administration.
 
That spending plan, which comes with no net increase in staffing or services, would result in an 11.73 percent increase in the assessment to Lanesborough (up by $801,742 from FY26) and a 12.71 percent increase to Williamstown (up by $1,883,944).
 
The draft budget could address some of the needs expressed by the school councils in each of the district's three schools. But it does so by reallocating positions in the FY26 budget and without adding any full-time equivalent positions (FTEs), Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the School Committee.
 
Both Lanesborough Elementary and Williamstown Elementary listed the addition of a math interventionist as one of their top priorities for FY27 in presentations given to the School Committee over the last couple of months.
 
"Both elementary schools have potential paths to gaining math interventionists," Bergeron said. "The increases that you see within what we have here, meaning the 12 and 13 percent increases, those embed with them the ability to gain those math interventionists within the staffing. In order to do that, we would need to move pieces around within schools.
 
"If we wanted to … purely increase FTEs in order to achieve math interventionists at the elementary schools coming in from the outside? Each town's budget would need to increase by about another $100,000, and that equates to increasing each town's percentage [increase] by another .4 to .5 percent."
 
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