VSO POPS

Silver Screen Classics

Dates and Venue 27 & 28 November @ 8 pm, .| The Orpheum (Vancouver)

Reviewer Ed Farolan

Conductor Steven Reineke, newly appointed Music Director of the New York Pops, introduced each piece, giving us behind-the-scenes info most of us didn't know about. I didn't know, for example, that Otto Preminger used Strauss's Zarathustra despite the fact that he had hired and paid some other screen composer to do the score. I also remembered the background music that was used for the TV Marlboro commercials when I heard the score played by the VSO for the movie The Magnificent Seven.

For a movie buff like me, this concert was an exciting and entertaining one. I had seen practically all the movies that were flashed on the two VSO Video Screens, screens on stage left and right as the orchestra played their scores. Leading the program together with vocalist Kristine Reese and dancer/singer Billy Tighe, great music from classic Hollywood movies, including Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Doctor Zhivago, The Magnificent Seven, The Godfather, Exodus, Titanic, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and many more, was magnificently delivered by the VSO.

This was also like a mini-musical, where Billy Tighe gave us a singing and dancing rendition of the classic Gene Kelly number, "Singing in the Rain". Kristine Reese also sang beautifully and danced with Tighe in a few numbers. Both are graduates of The University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music.

This concert was indeed a cinematic Pops spectacular!

.© 2009 Ed Farolan