Saturday night's Valentine's activities in Paducah include The Paducah Symphony in concert at the Carson Center. Music starts at 7:30 p.m. On Sounds Good, Kate Lochte speaks with the Symphony's Artistic Director and Conductor Raffaele Ponti about the grand selections of music in "A Lincoln Portrait," which he says is a powerful and sincere symphonic journey.
Lincoln Portrait features a living descendent of Abraham Lincoln - Ralph C. Lincoln, on stage giving readings during Aaron Copeland's composition of symbolic American music. The text opens with "He was born in Kentucky..." and takes off from there, inserted specifically by Copeland in the score with which it incorporates. Ponti says the work has a dramatic and powerful open structure and great orchestration.
The production opens with another Copeland piece, Fanfare for the Common Man, a piece that really shows off the brass and percussion sections.
Following that, it moves to Guiseppe Martucci's Nocturn No. 1, who Ponti says is a rare Italian composer who was a great pianist and well-known conductor. He describes his work as gorgeous in the symphonic repertoire. It features heart-touching singing tones both sentimental and sincere. The audience will fall in love with it.
The second half of the performance features William Walton's Symphony No. 1, b-flat minor, an epic composition in size and intensity by a composer who Ponti says deserves much more exposure in the US. He thinks part of the reason for this is that it has over 200 errata in the score: misprinted details over the four or five writings between the original and the rewrites. Nevertheless, critics have called it "powerful, malicious, melancholic, majestic and emotionally volatile." Ponti says gleefully, the audience should feel emotionally exhausted leaving the Carson Center.
