“FVSO @ The Movies”

Saturday, November 2, 2024, 3:00 pm

Hoffman Auditorium, Bruyette Athenaeum

University of Saint Joseph, West Hartford

BEETHOVEN: Symphony No. 7

ROSSINI: Overture to William Tell

PERRY: The Silent Years

Tickets

The FVSO kicks off its 44th Season and returns to the movies! Don’t miss the opportunity to see three silent film shorts projected above the stage with live orchestral accompaniment. Charlie Chaplin will get you laughing in The Gold Rush and you’ll swoon over John Barrymore in The Beloved Rogue. Who could forget Colin Firth’s moving performance in The King’s Speech featuring the solemn and powerful 2nd movement from Beethoven’s 7th Symphony. Don’t forget the popcorn!

 

William Perry has led an unusually varied creative life as a composer, producer, director and lyricist. Among his productions are six definitive films based on the major works of Mark Twain, which won the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award. (His music for these films is available on Naxos 8.570200.) The Broadway musical, Wind in the Willows, starring Nathan Lane, for which he wrote the music and co-authored the lyrics, was nominated for three Tony Awards. There is an Emmy amidst the many other awards for his more than seventy programs produced for American Public Television, and his concertos and other orchestral pieces are performed throughout the world.

Born in Elmira, New York, he attended Harvard University and studied with Paul Hindemith, Walter Piston and Randall Thompson. His concert and film music has been performed by many orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, the Saint Louis Symphony, the Detroit Symphony and the symphonic orchestras of Cincinnati, Minnesota, Montreal, Hartford, and Sydney, Australia as well as the Vienna Symphony, the Rome Philharmonic, the Slovak Philharmonic, the RTÉ National Symphony of Ireland and other orchestras in Europe

Perry is widely credited for playing a significant role in the revival of interest in films of the silent era, and Naxos Records has devoted several CDs to the orchestral scores he has written for the greatest of those films. For twelve years he was the music director and composer-in-residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he composed and performed as a pianist more than two hundred scores for the Museum’s silent film collection. He then provided the scores for the now-legendary television series, The Silent Years (1971, 1975) starring Orson Welles and Lillian Gish, winning an Emmy Award. For three years (1976-1978) he produced and scored a poetry series for PBS called Anyone for Tennyson? starring Henry Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Claire Bloom, William Shatner and Vincent Price among others. He later developed and produced the four-part DVD series, The Poetry Hall of Fame, which he also hosted.