At Sunset Center last night the Monterey Symphony cast a magic spell that once again reaffirmed the magic of Disney and the magic of music by presenting a 74-year-old motion picture that broke all the rules in 1940, yet is still fresh and relevant today.
What we were witnessing in the opening concert of its new season was the Monterey Symphony’s presentation of Disney’s “Fantasia Live in Concert” and the conducting debut of Juan Felipe Molano with the area’s 69-year-old orchestra. Molano, music director of Youth Orchestra Salinas and the Youth Orchestra of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, led the professional musicians in the complicated task of syncing the live music with Disney’s film, which was projected to a screen at the back of the stage.
As a technical feat this was more difficult than it might at first appear. In the sound booths at the rear of Sunset Center a team of highly sophisticated technicians were simultaneously projecting two versions of Fantasia. One version appeared over the heads of the musicians on stage in glorious HD color accompanying the music, while a second version, a technical marvel in itself, with visual cues and occasional metronomic pulse indications, was beamed to a computer monitor attached to the conductor’s music stand.
I had been wondering all week long in the run up to this concert how on earth the conductor was going to accurately sync the live Monterey Symphony to the complicated choreography on the film, for example: a group of hippos in tutus dancing en pointe to the music of Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” Incidentally, during this portion of the film I wondered how many people in the audience were imagining in their minds the hilarious comedy shtick “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah, Here I am at camp Grenada,” created by Spike Jones, a popular musician and comedian of the 1940s and 1950s, who most probably first became aware of the “Dance of the Hours” through “Fantasia” during its initial release.
Well, it all ran like clockwork, and it was a rousing success. On Friday “Fantasia Live in Concert” was presented in three separate concerts to approximately 3000 schoolchildren. The students came by bus from Greenfield, Santa Rita and several other school districts. Those from the four large schools in the Sherwood Hall neighborhood (Kamman, El Gabilan, Natividad and Madonna del Sasso) walked over. Cleverly, the orchestra split the performance, which we heard in its entirety at the opening concert of the season at Sunset Center, into two sections thus filling the Sherwood auditorium seats twice. Hosting the children’s concerts was Dr. Todd Samra, education director for the Monterey Symphony, who even provided the students with a quick lesson in concert etiquette prior to Molano’s appearance on stage.
It was Walt Disney’s original wish to create an entirely new audience for great symphonic music. Using his principal character, Mickey Mouse, in a clever cartoon depiction, Disney succeeded in familiarizing the world with French composer Paul Dukas’ tone poem “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” in which Mickey soon looses control and the magic used to get the mop to help him clean creates many, many more mops. Some of the other remarkable parts of this concert were the music and animation that accompanied Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, selections from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance and Respighi’s Pines of Rome.
Digitally remastered, the colors of the projected images were crisp and saturated, and the only way you could tell whether the images came from the 1940 or 2000 versions was by the extent that the images filled the overhead screen — the 1940 images had a different aspect ratio and didn’t quite fill the screen, but in either version the visuals were spectacular.
The Monterey Symphony also sounded spectacular. As a preparation for this concert I watched a DVD three-disk boxed version that contained everything (and more) of what we experienced on Saturday night at Sunset Center. The small speakers on our TV did not do justice to the power or drama of the music, so hearing the Monterey Symphony in this glorious production was a revelation.
The ovation from the audience was overwhelming, and as a reward Molano gave us an encore, a performance of a section from Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals. It was fabulous!
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