“The Philadelphia Orchestra will be warned: In this week’s concert performances of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, principal guest conductor Stéphane Denève may well be reduced to weeping,” writes David Patrick Stearns in Thursday’s (10/13) Philadelphia Inquirer. “Even Italian opera doesn’t tug harder at the heartstrings than Steven Spielberg’s classic 1982 film about a boy and his lost space alien, which will be presented with the Philadelphia Orchestra playing the Oscar-winning John Williams score…. ‘I have to confess, it gets me each time,’ Denève said this week…. Though a dozen or fewer specialized stagehands are needed to hang speakers and screen in Verizon Hall, technical director Mike Runice [explains that] movies now exist on digital files. That’s partly what attracts a conductor of Denève’s reputation to such projects: The quality keeps getting better…. So devoted is Denève to E.T. that … his 8-year-old daughter, Alma … ‘will miss school for the rest of the week.… I wanted her to see her very first E.T. with her dad conducting.… I pray she will love the film that was so special for me.’ ”
Posted October 13, 2016
