Tonight: Tom Denny to give pre-performance talk at SPAC

Tom Denny, chair of Skidmore's Department of Music, will give the pre-performance talk at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center tonight, preparing the audience for a Philadelphia Orchestra concert that, conducted by Charles Dutoit, will feature Berlioz's Roman Carnival Overture, Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5, and pianist Andre Watts performing Grieg's Piano Concerto.

Denny's talk, titled "
Fjords, Festivals, and a Fifth," will begin at 7 p.m. with the concert following at 8 p.m. The forecast is for a cloudless sky and 72 degrees.

"The works are all wonderful Romantic favorites," says Denny. " Watts is a fabulous piano player and the Grieg is a real melodic crowd pleaser."  

Grieg's Piano Concerto, Denny noted, was the piece played by the young pianist-sailor with the Boston Pops in the 1958 film Windjammer. (Shot in "Cinemiracle" with seven-track stereophonic sound, the film gave viewers a panoramic image of the 17,500-nautical-mile voyage of this three-masted Norwegian training ship.)

"Tchaikovsky's 5th is full of beautiful lyricism and plenty of drama," he continued. "Like Beethoven's 5 ^th, it constructs a narrative of triumph overcoming adversity.  Tchaikovsky took a small musical idea first heard in the guise of a funeral march and transforms it in each movement until it assumes a heroic or triumphant pose in the finale.

"Berlioz' Roman Festival Overture uses extracts from his opera, Benvenuto Cellini, which in turn was based on the wild life of the master goldsmith for the high-living Renaissance popes."