Thursday, October 4, 2012

Conrad Koch as Jean Valjean.

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 By MICHAEL CLEVELAND

Staff Writer

MILFORD – Conrad Koch looks like Jean Valjean, the way Jean Valjean is supposed to look, the Jean Valjean of Donn Cook, of Colm Wilkinson.

Certainly not, though, the Valjean of Richard Jordan or Liam Neeson, one is happy to say.

And last year, he played Valjean, the hero of “Les Miserables,” albeit only for a few minutes, when he performed “Bring Him Home” in the town’s Great Pumpkin Festival talent show.

He got a standing ovation.

He came in second.

To an 11-year-old girl from Hollis, Caroline Burns.

Well, Koch is coming back for more this year, but he won’t be alone: He is part of a quartet called Just in Time with fellow singers from the Souhegan Valley Chorus, and they will perform George and Ira Gershwin’s “Someone to Watch Over Me” after making the cut at last weekend’s auditions. With him in the quartet will be Tina Summers and Patrick McCarty of Amherst, and Jonatha Pierdominici of Nashua.

Koch had also signed up to audition as a solo act in case the quartet didn’t make the finals, but now he’ll go on with his group because the rules say he can only do one performance.

“I’ve got mixed feelings about the quartet vs. solo,” he said in an interview last week. “I’d like to do both, but it’s not in the cards to be able to do that.”

Those are the rules: One act for each person, he said.

So now he and his fellow singers will go on sometime on Saturday, Oct. 6. The show starts at 8 p.m. at the Amato Center at the Boys and Girls Club of Souhegan Valley.

Koch (pronounced Kotch) is 71 and a retired aerospace and defense science and technology marketing director who began singing when he was 3 or 4, primarily because his mother sang and his father whistled. He caught the musical bug and when he was a freshman in high school, he joined the chorus. That was in 1955 in Boca Ciega High in St. Petersburg, Fla.

In the chorus, “I was recognized as fairly accomplished for my age,” and he also sang in his church choir.

He and his wife moved to Milford from Nashua in 2000 and after he retired, he joined the Souhegan Valley Chorus. Now he is the chorus manager, responsible for setting up rehearsal and concert venues, “and waxing my truck so it will look nice in the Labor Day parade,” in which he participates with the Chorus.

That’s fun, of course, but it is singing that he loves.

Asked why, he had to think for several seconds.

“I guess the emotion evoked by the harmonics and the tune,” he said. “It’s not so much the words as the feeling I get either solo or in a group.”

It was something he hadn’t really thought about, he said.

Despite coming in second last year, he said he was thrilled by the talent show and by the reaction to his performance. He also had high praise for the young lady who came in first.

“She sung a song I’d never heard before and did extremely well,” Koch said. “She had all of the stage presence and poise you could imagine. She is really talented.”

He said the audience reaction to his song was fantastic: He got a standing ovation.

“I was, in the vernacular, blown away,” Koch said. “It was one of my most memorable and satisfying experiences. I can’t find the right words, but I was certainly elated.”

The song Caroline Burns sang was Adelle’s “Rolling in the Deep,” said Tracy Hutchins, executive director of the Milford Improvement Team, which puts on the Pumpkin Festival.

“She was a fantastic singer,” Hutchins said.

Still, coming in second was something Koch enjoyed and he won $200, half of which he donated to the Souhegan Valley Chorus, and the other half to the Boys and Girls Club of Souhegan Valley.

He also competed in the Telegraph’s Encore Superstar contest and made the final 16.

Now, as he prepares for this year’s Pumpkin Festival show, he rehearses on his own and with the quartet, hoping in one way or another to make it through the auditions and onto the Saturday night stage.

“I’m looking forward to either,” he said.