"Great Music for Great Films" will be featured on Saturday at the Academy of Music Theatre.
Pioneer Valley Symphony conductor Paul Phillips One of the oldest community orchestras in the United States, the Pioneer Valley Symphony launches its 74th season on Saturday with a concert entitled “Great Music for Great Films” in the resoundingly appropriate venue of the Academy of Music Theatre.
For the opening program of this season, collectively called “PVS at the Movies,” music director Paul Phillips has selected Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” William Perry’s “The Silent Years,” and Alexander Borodin’s Symphony No. 2.
Perry’s music has appeared on PVS programs in the past. The symphony recently played his “Gemini” Concerto for violin, piano, and orchestra with the twin sisters to which it is dedicated, Ambra and Fiona Albek, as soloists, and in 2008, (also at the Academy,) they offered his delightful suite “Six Title Themes In Search of a Movie.” Born in Elmira, NY in 1930, Perry studied with Paul Hindemith, Randall Thompson, and Walter Piston at Harvard. For 12 years he served as music director and composer-in-residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he wrote and performed scores to more than 300 silent movies.
The direct melodies, good humor, and skillful scoring of Perry’s “Six Title Themes” charmed everyone in the house with “Dance Overture from Wild Nights in Toronto,” “Waltz from The Raincoats of Dijon” “Serenade from Angelus for an Angel” “March from The Bridge on the River Platte,” “Blues from The Black Marigold,” and “Sirius Finale from Voyage to the Dog Star.” The movement titles alone were worth the price of admission.
In “The Silent Years,” Perry has included excerpts from scores he wrote to accompany three films; “The Beloved Rogue” (1927) an historical epic starring John Barrymore and Conrad Veidt; Blood and Sand (1922), a bullfighting story starring Rudolph Valentino and Nita Naldi; and The Gold Rush (1925), Charlie Chaplin’s first feature-length comedy. Saturday’s performance will be accompanied by film clips (or vice versa?).
The Rossini “William Tell Overture” owes most of its notoriety to its use as the main title theme to the “Lone Ranger” radio and television series. Its “Ranz de Vaches,” storm music, and headlong “March of the Swiss Soldiers” have provided the soundtrack to many Bugs Bunny antics.
While the connection between Borodin’s Second Symphony and film music is tenuous, it does exist, as revealed by PVS annotator and principal oboist Zeke Hecker.
“For the songs to the Broadway musical Kismet,” Hecker writes, “Robert Wright and George Forrest simply appropriated Borodin’s works. The number entitled “Fate” is drawn from this symphony.
In describing the symphony itself, Hecker cites the Russian critic Stassov, who promoted the works of Russian nationalist composers.
“The first movement depicts an assembly of Russian knights. The Scherzo could be intended to suggest a headlong chase, but it could equally well be a festive scene. The third movement was to have depicted Bayan, the legendary minstrel who appears in the Lay of Igor’s Campaign, and the finale is meant to depict the knights’ feast, the sound of the gusli (an ancient stringed instrument, similar to a zither, played by Russian bards) and a jubilant throng of people.” The rest of the PVS season includes film-related music by John Williams, Gian-Carlo Menotti, Henry Mancini, Aaron Copland, and George Gershwin.
Phillips commented about the season’s theme, “There is so much fabulous film music that our biggest problem was deciding what to play.”
The PVS will also perform concert classics by Dvorak, Mahler, Mozart, Wagner, and on the new music front, the Violin Concerto by Philip Glass.