RPO - Barber, Copland, etc. & Disney Fantasia

When I was a teenager, I had the usual love of rock & roll and disdain for classical music.  My parents dragged me to the occasional concert at the Kennedy Center, but mostly took my older brother, Peter, who had a much better appreciation of the music than I did.  My love of classical music developed almost too late to thank my parents for their thwarted early attempts to educate me musically. 

It always amazes me when I hear a piece on the radio that has been ‘covered’ by a popular musician.  I can’t listen to Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé Suite without singing Sting’s “I Hope the Russians Love Their Children Too” (which, to me, came first!), or  Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony without singing Eric Carmen’s “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” (ditto).  My first exposure to Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 was actually in the Womble’s song, “Minuetto Allegretto”!

I now really enjoy going to classical music concerts in general, and the RPO in particular.  They are a wonderful orchestra (as Pops conductor Jeff Tyzik graciously reminds us at performances) and they deserve a creative, committed, collaborative conductor.  In the meantime, Rochester is going to benefit from a series of guest conductors (and who knows, maybe one will stick?).  Larry Rachleff, of the Rhode Island Philharmonic, recently conducted an enjoyable concert of 20^th century music, including Copland’s Appalachian Spring (again, my first exposure was through song – Peter asked me to sing  “Simple Gifts” at his wedding back in 1980).  It was incredible to watch him conduct the entire program from memory, and to hear Juliana Athayde, ordinarily the Concertmaster, solo on the violin, which alternately sang and wept.

This past weekend’s performance of Disney’s Fantasia Live in Concert was nothing short of astounding. It must have been a revolutionary concept in 1940 to set an animated film to classical music, but it is also revolutionary to “reverse engineer” it, as Tyzik explained, and perform the music in time with the movie.  Today’s technology makes that possible, and he demonstrated the screen he was watching as he conducted, which displayed the film as well as the measure numbers and beats per measure, and the earpiece he was wearing that clicked the tempo as well.  Not much conducting latitude in this concert!  I found myself visually torn: watching the film on the giant screen, watching the measures on the conductor’s screen, and watching Tyzik anticipating changes in tempo and translating them to his baton.  It was fascinating.

At one point, Tyzik asked the audience, “are you having fun?” The audience applauded loudly, of course, and he then admitted what a challenge it was to marry the musical performance to the screen and to constrain his own conducting instincts – he joked that it was, indeed, “rocket science.”  There were lots of children in the audience, and they must have been delighted at the multi-media presentation.  What a great way to get the next generation engaged and interested in classical music!  If there’d been a concert like this when I was a child (impossible, of course, before the age of computers), perhaps I would not have been so recalcitrant.  Then again,…