Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra Pops plays The Beatles

Rochester, New York — This Friday and Saturday, April 22 and 23 at 8:00 p.m. in Kodak Hall, RPO Principal Pops Conductor Jeff Tyzik will lead “Revolution: The Music of The Beatles, A Symphonic Experience”.

According to Tyzik, a classic Rochester story describing how the passion project came to be Tuesday during News 8 at Noon.

“Several years ago a gentleman whose name is Robert Thompson — he’s the President of Wise Music, one of the biggest publishing companies in the world — and also an Eastman graduate, and I must say a disclaimer – 35 years ago when I was in town playing for revenue as a young musician in the pit orchestra at the Auditorium Theatre, he sat next to me and he played first trumpet, so I’ve known him for many, many years — he and I have done a lot of projects together and we started talking about the fact that he had the rights to The Beatles catalog and also he was working on getting the rights to some of the images of The Beatles from an early photography shoot that had never been released before by this wonderful photographer, so we started talking about putting together a Beatles concert.”

“We really wanted to pay homage and tribute to not only The Beatles’ great songs but also the work that George Martin did, who was their producer and sometimes known as the fifth Beatle. Many songs — ‘Penny Lane’ is one of them, ‘Yesterday,’ there are so many songs that had orchestral instruments in them. As a matter of fact, in ‘Penny Lane’ the baroque trumpet solo is a significant part of that piece and it was played by this British trumpet player on a piccolo trumpet which is a baroque instrument. So there was already a sense of orchestration in a lot of this music and I decided to kind of enhance it a little bit but also — as I said — be very careful and pay homage to the original versions.”

In addition to “Penny Lane” and “Yesterday” audiences will hear a selection of 28 Beatles hits including “Get Back,” “I Am the Walrus,” “Something,” and “Let It Be.”

Audiences will get a rare opportunity first starting at 7:00 p.m. on both nights, but the music will start at 8:00 p.m.

“We’re going to have Andy Babiuk who wrote a book on The Beatles gear, in other words, all of the equipment that they used through all of the years,” Tyzik explained. “He’s going to be on a little panel with me and also Robert Thompson and we’re going to have the first-ever Pops concert pre-concert chat starting a 7 o’clock both nights and we’re going to talk a little bit about how we put the concert together, some of these things about The Beatles gear and what they used and what made them unique, and then we’re going to open it up to questions from the audience so it’s going to be a very unique experience.”

You can get tickets and more information by calling (585) 454-2100 or by visiting RPO.org.