Warming up for Halloween with classical music
The Springfield Symphony Orchestra is marking its 75th anniversary this season by offering some unique works. And with Halloween just around the corner, the orchestra will turn to Hector Berlioz’s eerie “Symphonie Fantastique,” the French composer’s haunted ode about an unrequited love, for its next performance.
The concert, which takes place Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Springfield Symphony Hall, will also feature a guest appearance by the Billboard chart-topping pianist Natasha Paremski (at left), who will perform Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Piano Concerto in D minor.
“Symphonie Fantastique,” which Berlioz wrote in 1830, has been likened to an early example of psychedelia due to its dreamlike and hallucinatory passages; there’s some suggestion Berlioz composed at least some of the music while using opium. His inspiration for the piece was his desperate, one-sided love for Irish actress Harriet Smithson, whom he’d seen in an 1827 production of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”
Berlioz wrote Smithson a succession of letters she never responded to, though after she heard “Symphonie Fantastique,” she met the composer, and the two married in 1833 (though the marriage did not last).
The Russian-born Paremski, meantime, who now lives in New York, has been wowing audiences with what critics call her “dazzling technique” and extensive interpretive abilities. Springfield Symphony Director and Conductor Kevin Rhodes says he’s been looking for years for an opportunity to bring her to Springfield and is thrilled that time has finally come.
“Natasha Paremski makes her Springfield debut performing the most Olympian of all concertos, Rachmaninoff’s 3rd Piano Concerto!” Rhodes says.
Tickets start at $22 and are available online at SpringfieldSymphony.org or by phone at (413) 733-2291. They can also be purchased at the symphony’s Box Office, at 1441 Main Street, Monday-Friday from 9:30 a.m.– 4:30 p.m.; on “Concert Saturdays,” 1-3 p.m.; and at Symphony Hall, 34 Court Street, on concert nights from 6-7:30 p.m.
A jazzy weekend in Northampton
After a few years hiatus, the Northampton Jazz Festival returns this weekend with over a dozen acts and a varied schedule that will feature free and to-pay performances in a variety of downtown locales, from restaurants to Pulaski Park to The Parlor Room.
Headlining the event, which begins Friday at 5 p.m. and continues through early Sunday afternoon, is Paquito D’Rivera (at right), the Cuban-born clarinet and saxophone player who’s won 14 Grammy awards and first performed with Cuba’s National Theater Orchestra at age 10; at 17 he was a featured soloist with the Cuban National Symphony Orchestra. D’Rivera and his quintet play Saturday at the Academy of Music at 7:30 p.m.
Other featured performers on Saturday, at a variety of downtown locations, include pianist Miro Sprague, Giacomo Gates & Friends, and the Felipe Salles Quartet. Salles, a professor of jazz and African-American music at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, won a Guggenheim Fellowship earlier this year to write a composition inspired by the experiences of “Dreamers,” children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants.
The music fest starts off Friday with a “Jazz Strut” in which small ensembles will play in selected bars and restaurants (and Pulaski Park) all evening long. There’s also a jazz brunch beginning at noon on Sunday at the Hotel Northampton that’s designed in part to raise money for a jazz program at JFK Middle School.
For tickets and more information on the jazz festival, visit northamptonjazzfest.org.
— Steve Pfarrer