Movie music magic moves, motivates

Conductor Rafael Enrique Irizarry, the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra’s assistant music director (Facebook via Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico - Página Oficial)

By PEGGY ANN BLISS

Special to The STAR

Over the past week, the musicians of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra (PRSO) have been walking around in a daze, their heads in the clouds.

Or so their conductor Rafael Enrique Irizarry believes. In a text talk with the STAR, the orchestra’s associate music director outlined his own reasons the audience at Saturday’s concert could have the same reaction: “Judicious selection of musical themes” and the orchestra’s goal “to educate, to inspire and to edify” are the elements needed to have every audience member walking on air, too.

On Saturday night at 7, the PRSO will offer its unique antidote to Sanse overdose with a program of movie scores dedicated to the recent centennial of the birth of American composer and conductor Henry Mancini (1924-1994). The more intimate setting will pay homage to the creator of “Pink Panther,” “Moon River” and scores of other masterpieces, such as Oscar winners “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Days of Wine and Roses.”

Opening the program will be “Tribute to the Film Composer,” arranged by John Williams and including “The Thorn Birds” and “The Glass Menagerie.”

“The scores chosen have had a profound impact on our musicians,” Irizarry said. “We have been rehearsing in a sort of dream-like state, moved by the beauty and professionalism of the orchestra as it plays these masterworks.”

He has already seen a preview of the inspiring effect of the program on everybody who attends.

“Dear Readers, Come one! come all!” he urges.

Also on the program, Irizarry said, are scores by “the masterful Alfred Newman, one of the luminaries of Hollywood’s Golden Age,” Harry Gregson Williams, and the “immortals” Alan Silvestri and Jerry Goldsmith.

Due to this judicious selection, the 2026 film tribute “will linger in [the audience’s] memory for a long time after the applause has died down,” said the artistic adviser to the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music and graduate of Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University at Bloomington. “And that is the point.”

These kinds of concerts were a magnet for audiences in Puerto Rico before they became the universal bulwarks they are now. However, they had long been missing from the schedule, said Irizarry, who has introduced many new genres and composers to local audiences.

This is not strictly a pops concert, he noted, referring to the monosyllable description of the concert as a “derisive” term.

“We will not be remiss in fulfilling our storied mission: in continuing to educate, inspire and to edify,” he adds in his professorial way, known to his many followers on radio and other venues.

Before he accepted his present position in 2015, Irizarry played in the PRSO’s horn section for 32 years. Years earlier, he had studied conducting in Venezuela’s iconic program “El sistema” on a three-year stipend from the Organization of American States.

Irizarry has kept audiences informed through lectures and classes in the Conservatory and the Performing Arts Center over his several decades with the orchestra, especially in connection with innovation and unfamiliarity. The subjects of his eclectic radio programs have ranged from Julie Andrews to Zarzuela and his courses from medieval to Space Age.