Music lovers to enjoy movie scores and opera with picnic fare Sunday Oct. 1 at Guglielmo Winery concert
Published in the September 27 – October 10, 2017 issue of Morgan Hill Life
A special South Valley Symphony concert will be held Oct. 1 at Guglielmo Winery. For tickets visit www.southvalleysymphony.org.
Photo courtesy South Valley Symphony
May the musical force be with you.
The South Valley Symphony orchestra is gearing up to perform not just one but two pops concerts in early October featuring music from Hollywood and Broadway. For “Star Wars” fans, the second concert will bring the Bay Area premiere of the rousing “The Force Awakens Suite.”
The first concert, called “From Hollywood to the Met,” launches the symphony’s 44th season and takes place Sunday, Oct. 1, at Guglielmo Winery. It will feature popular movie themes from “Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Jurassic Park,” and “The Lord of the Rings.”
Another highlight of the concert to stir the emotions of the audience will be romantic opera duets sung by tenor Christopher Bengochea and soprano Sandra Rubalcava Bengochea from Verdi’s “La Traviata” and “Rigoletto,” and Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”
Guglielmo Winery decided to partner with the symphony with this pops concert to introduce South Valley residents to the wonders of symphonic music played in a vineyard setting with lighter music most people might know from pop culture, said South Valley Symphony musical director and conductor Anthony Quartuccio.
“This is the first time ever concert that we’re playing at Guglielmo Winery,” he said. “It’s never been done be-fore in all the years of both the existence of the winery and the orchestra. It has been a desire of both the winery and orchestra to combine for this event, but because of the scheduling logistics, we haven’t been able to do it before. It’ll include a variety of a lot of our favorite stuff that we love to play. It’s pops and lighter stuff.”
The concert will finish with a couple of short ariettas with familiar melodies that everyone can sing along to, he added.
“There are going to be tunes flying by that people have heard on the silver screens, and tunes that people have heard on the radio or television or other contexts that are beautiful melodies that have surfaced on all levels of our culture,” Quartuccio said. “We are taking the best of the best and perform them in a beautiful location on a Sunday afternoon.”
The SVS orchestra will play a new set of movie music and show tunes starting 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 7, at the Gavilan College Theater with its “From Broadway to Hollywood” concert.
The concert will highlight hit songs from Broadway, including George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess,” as an American form of art. Popular Hollywood music from John Williams will arouse the audience, including “Harry Potter” and the South Bay’s premiere of the “Star Wars: The Force Awakens Suite.”
“We would like to celebrate something that’s very near and dear to our hearts as musicians,” Quartuccio said. “We’re celebrating the two home-grown art forms with some of the most famous and loved music from both Broadway and Hollywood, putting them together to remind people that in our American culture, this is stuff that we have created here on our soil — and it is celebrated all around the world.”
The Oct. 7 concert will offer a lottery for 10 children to come on stage and sit with the orchestra as they perform during the finale. It’s an experience that will help them see how music is made from the musicians’ point of view, Quartuccio said.
“It’s based on an amazing success from what we did last year at the March concert and we’re going to continue it as a tradition,” Quartuccio said.
