Lakewood Symphony's 2007-08 season ends on May 22 with "Fantasy Night."It will be an evening of musical fantasies to delight your imagination.

The program opens with Leonard Bernstein's rollicking Overture to Candide. The 1956 operetta was based on the satirical novel of the same name by Voltaire. The original production of the operetta flopped, running only two months, but much of the score was recorded on an album that enjoyed popular success. The operetta has been revived from time to time, but the most enduring part continues to be the Overture. It has become one of the most frequently performed orchestral works by a 20 th century American composer.

The second piece on our program is the wonderful work for violin and orchestra by Pablo Sarasate entitled Carmen Fantasy. Sarasate lived during the late 19th century and was an exceptional child prodigy on the violin, beginning his studies at the age of five. His Carmen Fantasy contains four movements and a prelude, corresponding to the orchestral prelude of the opera Carmen by Bizet and its four acts. Included in this piece are adaptations of Aragonaise, Habanera, Seguidilla, and the Gypsy Dance. Included in the first movement is the famous Habanera sung by Carmen in the opera, while the second movement is gentle. The third movement is very lively and Carmen Fantasy concludes with a Bohemian Dance, high energy for both the dancers in the original opera and the musicians playing the concert fantasy in the orchestra.

Our violin soloist for this concert is Claude Sim, assistant concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony. Claude has performed with the Lakewood Symphony on a number of occasions and we are proud to showcase his artistry once again. He is a native of Chicago and a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he served as concertmaster and soloist with the Oberlin Orchestra. An active chamber musician, Claude has enjoyed collaborations with the critically acclaimed Miro and Pacifica Quartets in concerts across the United States. His performances have been featured on NPR and WNIB Classical Radio. At age 21, Claude was appointed associate concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and has since performed as soloist with that orchestra several times.

Concluding "Fantasy Night" is Hector Berlioz's monumental Symphonie Fantastiqu, the work with which Berlioz's name is most closely associated. The composition of this revolutionary masterpiece marked a breakthrough in the composer's career, at once the culmination of his years of apprenticeship, and the starting point of his mature work as a symphonic composer. The premise of the symphony is that under the influence of opium, a young and sensitive artist experiences a series of visions - the different movements of the symphony - in which his beloved figures as a theme, the idée fixe, which recurs in each of the five movements.

The idée fixe pervades the volatile and tempestuous first movement which is titled "Dreams and Passions." The second movement, "A Ball," is an elegant waltz that includes two harps, giving the music a festive glitter that is characteristic of Berlioz.

The long third movement, "Scene in the Country," is the musical heart of the symphony, as well as the pivotal point in the drama: from the world of imagined reality in the first three movements the music moves to the world of imagined nightmare in the last two. This movement recalls Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. The idéefixe, briefly alluded to early in the movement, reappears in the stormy middle episode.

In the idée fixe of the fourth movement, "March to the Scaffold," Berlioz's artist is led to execution for murdering his beloved. He remembers her on the scaffold, but the melody is abruptly cut off by the fall of the guillotine and the concluding uproar.

In the fifth movement, "A Witches' Sabbath," the idée fixe makes its last appearance. First we hear a momentous Dies irae (Day of Wrath) and then the Witches' Sabbath. The two come together as the music hurtles to a wild, headlong conclusion.

Fantasy Night takes place at the Lakewood Cultural Center on Thursday, May 22, 7:30 p.m. Tickets are available online at www.lakewoodsymphony.org or by calling (303) 987-7845.