Opening Night at SPAC, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stéphane Denève, with Garrick Ohlsson, Piano, by Michael Miller
Saratoga Performaing Arts Center
Wednesday, August 1 / 8:00 PM
Opening Night
The Philadelphia Orchestra
Stéphane Denève Conductor
Garrick Ohlsson Piano
Tchaikovsky – Piano Concerto No. 1 op. 23, B-Flat minor
Rachmaninoff – Symphony No. 2 op. 27, E minor
The Philadelphia Orchestra’s season at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a distinguished tradition which has continued since its opening in 1966, began most splendidly with a Tchaikovsky-Rachmaninoff program led by Stéphane Denève with Garrick Ohlsson joining him for Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. This was my first visit to SPAC, so I’ll have to discuss what I heard in the context of the Center’s remarkable acoustics. Designed to seat 5200 people, the Center is slightly larger than the Music Shed at Tanglewood, but it has a surprisingly intimate feeling to it, as one traverses the grounds and descends the grassy slope, where the picnicking crowd can sit and hear the music very well—without amplification, as far as I could see or hear. It is only when one actually enters the hall and sees the orchestra dwarfed in the two-story space that one realizes just how vast it is.

