Serving as a kickoff to both Tech Week and Commencement exercises, tomorrow night's Tech Night at the Pops not only gives a nod to MIT in its theme but features an MIT lecturer as soloist.
Entitled "Great Discoveries, Great Music," the June 6 Boston Pops performance at Symphony Hall presents music related to ground-breaking discoveries and inventions. Highlights include the second movement from Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, which is known to have been inspired by the introduction of the metronome; Polovetsian Dances from Borodin's Prince Igor (Borodin was also a chemist); John William's Theme from the film Jurassic Park; and Leroy Anderson's The Typewriter.
The featured soloist for the evening will be soprano Pamela Wood (formerly Pamela Ambush), MIT lecturer in music, who will make her Boston Pops debut. Her selections for Tech Night at the Pops include two spirituals orchestrated especially for the occasion by William Cutter, also a lecturer in music and director of MIT's Concert Choir.
Ms. Wood, who has been recognized by MIT as a Black Achiever, has appeared with orchestras in this country and abroad, including the symphony orchestras of Boston, London, San Francisco, Baltimore and Chicago, the New York Philharmonic, the Israel Philharmonic, and the American Composers' Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of such conductors as Dennis Russel Davies, Zubin Mehta, Michael Tilson Thomas and David Zinman. With John A. Ross and members of the Voices of Black Persuasion and the New England Spiritual Ensemble, Ms. Wood is recording spirituals and other sacred works on the Revels label.
The program will be conducted by Robert Bernhardt, music director of the Rochester Philharmonic and the Chattanooga Symphony and Opera Association, who has led several Boston Pops concerts since his debut with the Pops in 1992.
A limited number of $40 and $12 tickets are still available for Tech Night at the Pops and will be sold on the day of the performance (Thursday, June 6) at Kresge Auditorium from noon-6pm. For more information, call x3-8203.
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on June 5, 1996.
