“Longtime Hudson Valley Philharmonic conductor Randall Craig Fleischer has been a highly visible bridge-builder between the Big Show wing of classical music and the world of pop—especially rock—music,” writes John Burdick in Thursday’s (8/10) Hudson Valley One (Kingston, N.Y.). “Fleischer has ‘orchestrated’ some curious mashups in his tenure, the most unlikely being a kind of guitar concerto pairing Fleischer’s Hudson Valley Philharmonic [HVP] with the late Velvet Underground lead guitarist Sterling Morrison. It thus comes as no surprise that Fleischer is a key player in Rocktopia, which is coming to the Bethel Center for the Arts on Saturday, August 12…. A collaboration between the HVP and Trans-Siberian Orchestra vocalist Rob Evan, Rocktopia presents one-of-a-kind musical arrangements featuring the works of classical composers, rock bands and artists including Queen, Mozart, Journey, Handel, U2, Tchaikovsky, Heart, Beethoven, Styx, Foreigner, Rachmaninoff, Pink Floyd, Copland, the Who and more. Evan oversees the many vocalists required to pull this off, while Maestro Fleischer whips the HVP into a frenzy; and it all goes down on the site of the original 1969 Woodstock concert.”
Posted August 11, 2017
