Johnstown Symphony Orchestra Music Director James Blachly “did his best impression of Freddie Mercury on Saturday night, bounding onto the stage, flinging his arms wide and bellowing, ‘Hello, Johnstown!’ to the ceiling,” writes Mark Pesto in Sunday’s (9/23) Tribune-Democrat (Johnstown, PA). “The 1,400 people who had crowded into a cavernous mill and one-night-only concert hall at JWF Industries responded enthusiastically…. The show—‘The Johnstown Symphony Orchestra Presents the Music of Queen,’ the 2019 edition of the orchestra’s series of ‘mill concerts’ and the latest effort by the orchestra’s leaders to ‘bring the symphony to the heart of the city,’ as Blachly put it—was on…. Saturday’s show [was] the natural evolution of a series of mill concerts that began in 2017 when the orchestra played a wildly popular concert to a standing-room-only crowd at the then-vacant former Bethlehem Steel machine shop on Iron Street…. Jeans n’ Classics and the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra were joined during the second half of the concert by a chorus made up of select students of several local high school music departments … and of members of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown chorus and the Johnstown Symphony Chorus.”
Posted September 25, 2019
