Performing Arts Series: Sigmund Romberg Orchestra & Soloists
Johnson County Community College
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Welcome the holiday season with A Viennese Christmas, an evening of holiday and Viennese music performed by the New Sigmund Romberg Orchestra and Soloists, at 3 and 8 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 5, in Yardley Hall of the Carlsen Center, Johnson County Community College.
The Choraliers, a select group from the Johnson County Chorus, will sing carols in the Carlsen Center lobby beginning at 7 p.m.
A Viennese Christmas features an orchestra of 36 top professional orchestra musicians and four world-class vocalists conducted by Jason Altieri, associate conductor of the Atlanta Pops Orchestra. The New Sigmund Romberg Orchestra keeps the music of the prolific composer as fresh and alive as the day it was performed by the likes of Nelson Eddy, Jeanette McDonald and Billie Holiday.
The orchestra takes its name from Hungarian-born composer Romberg and titles the program in reference to the Viennese-style of Romberg’s operettas that became Broadway and Hollywood classics.
The program features Christmas music from carols to classics, including the upbeat Sleigh Ride, the melodic overture of Strauss’ Christmas/New Year operetta Die Fledermaus, Babes in Toyland, traditional Viennese music and waltzes, and selections from Romberg’s operettas — The Student Prince, Up in Central Park and The New Moon.
Born in Hungary, Romberg was educated in Vienna as an engineer but also studied composition. Immigrating to New York City in 1909, he played piano in a fashionable restaurant and then formed his own orchestra. Romberg’s career as a composer of operettas with a Viennese flavor was established in the 1920s with works like those named above. Among his friends and collaborators were Al Jolson, Oscar Hammerstein II, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Gus Kahn and Irving Berlin.
With the advent of “talkies,” Romberg moved to Hollywood in 1929. Several film adaptations of his operettas were released between 1929 and 1954, including the original Viennese Nights filmed in Technicolor in 1930.
Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, he hosted weekly radio programs that included his own compositions and works by other popular composers. In the early 1940s, Romberg organized his first tour of The Sigmund Romberg Orchestra playing Broadway music and “popular classics.” Because of its legacy, the orchestra is touted as the “first touring pops orchestra.” The New Sigmund Romberg Orchestra dates to 1994.
Romberg was a congenial, fun-loving man known for his appreciation of good food and drink. His last successful work was a musical comedy, Up in Central Park, in 1945. He was a tireless composer who was working on a new musical at the time of his death in 1951 at the age of 64.
Tickets for A Viennese Christmas are $25 and $15, available by calling the Performing Arts Series box office at 913-469-4445 or online at www.jccc.edu/TheSeries.
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