The Elizabeth Swain String Program held its first benefit concert Friday at Middletown High School to raise money for its local youth music program.

The program, founded in 2003, teaches 60 third-graders in the Middletown area how to play string instruments.

The students in the program opened Friday’s concert with cello and violin performances. They entertained the audience with folk songs and an all-cello rendition of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”

“The intent [of the concert] is to showcase the wonderful talent we have right here in Middletown and benefit the kids in the process,” said Bonne Bennet, director of grants and programs at Middlesex County Community Foundation.

The concert also featured string performances from Santo Frigilio, a local violinist who has taught music and performed in Middletown for more than 30 years; and debut performances from local composers Eli Fieldsteel and retired Wesleyan librarian Christopher Montgomery.

The headliners of the night were Anthea Kreston and Jason Duckles, members of the Amelia Piano Trio. In addition to debuting at Carnegie Hall and touring nationally with Amelia, the pair has toured with Yo Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project and won top prizes in the Concert Artists Guild Competition. Kreston and Duckles are now Middletown residents and greatly support the Swain string program.

“We’ve lived in Middletown for three years and we love it,” Kreston said. “We looked at a lot of places to live, and we knew when we saw Middletown that this was the place for us.”

The program is named after Elizabeth Swain, a former Rare Books Librarian and Archivist at Olin Library who died in 2000.

The program is the result of collaboration between the Middlesex County Community Foundation and the Middletown school system. She bequeathed a large amount to the Community Foundation for the enrichment of the arts in Middletown’s public schools.

“We set up at Elizabeth’s request a committee with representatives from the broader Middletown community that are involved in the arts,” said Patti Anne Vassia, president of the Middlesex County Community Foundation. “We heard proposals from various Middletown leaders and staff about how arts could be beneficial to Middletown schools.”

When the program first opened last year, there were approximately 30 third-graders. This year the size has almost doubled, and in another year, the program will include third, fourth, and fifth-graders along with a strings specialist hired by the Middletown public schools for sixth grade.

“Elizabeth’s dream was a strings program for elementary school children,” Vassia said. “We decided we would try as hard as possible to put one together.”

One of the students who performed on Friday was third-grader Helen Pinch, an eight year-old who has been playing violin for two years. She had studied the violin for one year previously to joining the Elizabeth Swain program last year.

“[When performing] I was scared at first, but once I started playing things got easier,” Pinch said. “My favorite thing other than performing is probably practicing.”

Pinch and the all students in the program study under Anna Falkenau, a Wesleyan graduate student who acts as head teacher and violin instructor. She joins Pinar Gosterisli, who has been teaching cello with the program since its formation in 2003.

The program holds lessons once a week after school. Students who can afford it pay a small fee, but scholarships have been set up to fund lessons for those who cannot. The committee has also raised additional money to buy instruments for the school system that then are rented to students on scholarships at no cost.

“It was amazing how well those children did in such a short amount of time,” Vassia said. “It was wonderful; the concerts were filled with parents.”

Ruth Montgomery, head of the Elizabeth Swain Program and close friend of Elizabeth Swain, felt that overall the night was a great success.

“A goal of ours was to create a program that could take kids all the way to high school orchestras; Elizabeth wanted this funding to carry out programming that would have a lasting effect,” she said. “Now, with a middle school strings specialist coming in 2006, Elizabeth’s dream of lasting enrichment for Middletown children can finally be realized.”