Pola Benke

Pola Benke conducts the Peninsula Symphony in a concert devoted to Hollywood film music, pairing John Williams' scores with the earlier orchestral work of Erich Korngold. Listeners can expect a program built around some of the best-known concert-hall arrangements of movie themes.

This program traces a line from Golden Age Hollywood to modern blockbuster scoring. Korngold's "Kings Row Suite" and "Hooray for Hollywood" show the lush, late-Romantic orchestral writing that shaped early film music, full of sweeping string melodies and bright brass fanfares. The Williams selections span decades of his output: the tender, rising theme from "E.T.", the brooding suite from "Star Wars" with its famous fanfare and marches, and the more recent "Across the Stars" love theme. A featured "Elegy for Cello and Orchestra" offers a quieter, more introspective moment amid the larger orchestral showpieces. Listeners new to orchestral music will recognize many of these tunes instantly, while the pairing with Korngold shows where that cinematic sound first took shape.