Is your idea of a perfect New Year celebration strictly dancing? Or how about an evening enjoying classic movies? Better still, you can join St Albans Symphony Orchestra in the city’s Cathedral on January 1st 2019 (7pm) for a concert of music that offers the best of both worlds!
Under Principal Conductor, Tom Hammond, the orchestra are dedicating the first half of their performance to favourite dance scores like Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. Included in the selection to be played is the celebrated ‘Knight’s Dance’, nowadays known to millions as the theme music to TV’s The Apprentice.
For those who prefer their dancing with a Latin flavour, the programme features ballet music that French romantic composer Jules Massenet wrote in Spanish style for his opera Le Cid, plus contemporary Mexican rhythms, courtesy of Arturo Marquez’s irresistible Conga del Fuego.
Switching to themes for the silver screen, SASO will perform excerpts from the dramatic score that Malcolm Arnold composed for the 1957 Oscar-winning film Bridge on the River Kwai, and then the intrepid march written by John Williams for the first of the Indiana Jones movies, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
What follows is a pulsating fandango penned by Bernard Herrmann for Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful North by Northwest, to be performed in a specially-commissioned arrangement. Italian film composer Ennio Morricone will be represented by his Academy Award-winning Gabriel’s Oboe from The Mission and his unforgettable theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, third in Sergio Leone’s series of ‘spaghetti’ westerns starring Clint Eastwood.
The second half of the performance will also bring opportunities for the audience to join in the fun.
Meanwhile, those who prefer a traditional Viennese flavour to their New Year music should note that this really is a concert with something for everyone. The ‘dance’ section opens with Johan Strauss II’s lilting Gypsy Baron Overture and the ‘movie’ half concludes with the same composer’s Blue Danube Waltz – music that St Albans-based director Stanley Kubrick included in his epic sci-fi movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Tickets are on sale from the St Albans Cathedral box office and online.
Click here for further information about the concert.