You don’t have to enjoy the experience of hearing a great orchestra voluntarily downplay itself as background music to think it’s a good idea for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra to program live performances with talking movies. Such crossovers make new friends for orchestras by making them more approachable in a context less intimidating than a concert hall that has no movie screen dangling down from the rafters.
This weekend SLSO is performing Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf (1936) at the Stifel Theatre in synchronization with Suzie Templeton’s stop-motion animation film she made to be screened with a performance of the Prokofiev composition. The film won the 2006 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Seeing Templeton’s uncannily expressive animation on a big screen in such a gorgeous theater was worth a cold, rainy drive downtown on a Saturday night.
…I have no yearning to hear the sounds of a buggy glen or to see the massive resources of a symphony orchestra put to such trivial use [as in Albert Roussel’s The Spider Feast]. As William H. Gass once said, anything can be made into an art form (even, in this case, the sounds of bugs), but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth doing.
However, she made the film in such a way that the orchestra is reduced to background music. The film’s action, edited with ambient noises, begins more than five minutes before Prokofiev and the orchestra, and the atmospheric sound persists throughout the performance. This is typical for live orchestral performances of talking films, but Templeton’s film has no dialogue. So, what we have here is a live orchestra – with abundant resources for making any sound effect needed for any film – playing along to a silent film with canned sound for its foley. A generous audience at the Stifel on Saturday night clearly enjoyed the synchronized performance thoroughly, but I kept longing for a supplementary score where the orchestra performs the film’s foley rather than playing background music to it.
As one expects from music director Stéphane Denève and the SLSO creative team, they found clever complements to this synchronized audiovisual performance. The program included two pieces of music composed with a visual component, two music for ballets, Albert Roussel’s The Spider’s Feast (1913) and Francis Poulenc’s Les Animaux modèles (1942), though both were presented here with substitutions for dancers.
For the Poulenc, Denève dispensed with a visual component and went narrative, having Ken Page read English translations of Jean de La Fontaine’s animal fables that inspired the ballet. A responsive audience followed La Fontaine and Page closely, laughing in the right places, but to me there was too much unaccompanied reading relative to the musical interludes. I was feeling that disappointing background music thing again. The narrator also had issues with his lavalier microphone that posed an unfortunate distraction with scraping and crackling noises – in this case, unintended (and therefore that much more unwelcome) atmospheric sound.
For the Roussel, SLSO and the New World Symphony commissioned animation by Grégoire Pontto take the visual place of the ballet. Though the audience mostly laughed at these glorified stick figures of a drooling spider, marching ants, a dancing mayfly and a dung beetle rolling up words from the captions in animated dung, this was the first thing that I have ever seen included in an SLSO program that I thought was simply bad. My guest had to close her eyes to avoid watching the repetitive, artless, redundant and corny animation detract from the musical performance.
The musicians all did their jobs as best they could, but the Roussel and Poulenc are both slow, quiet, static pieces. SLSO has not performed the Roussel since 1937 and this was a St. Louis premiere of the Poulenc, but I for one never would care to hear either piece performed live ever again. The best I can say is that Roussel shows that a symphony orchestra can be made to sound like a buggy glen. However, I have no yearning to hear the sounds of a buggy glen or to see the massive resources of a symphony orchestra put to such trivial use. As William H. Gass once said, anything can be made into an art form (even, in this case, the sounds of bugs), but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worth doing.
As you can see, there are good reasons why I don’t typically review the SLSO’s more pop offerings such as when they play along to talking movies. In this instance, especially after hearing conductor laureate Leonard Slatkin talk up the relationship between classical music and cartoons at the most recent SLSO concert, I simply had to see the stop motion animation film, wrongly expecting the film would be the silent accompaniment to the orchestra, rather than the orchestra being background music to the film. It was still worth a cold, rainy drive downtown on a Saturday night, even for me, and from what I could see and hear, the orchestra made some new friends.
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