Little Tramp, Big Concert

I've tried to avoid using this space to flog the Minnesota Orchestra's weekly concerts (other than the ones in our Inside the Classics series, of course,) because Sarah and I are very conscious of the potential for an "official" orchestra blog to come across as little more than a crass attempt to sell tickets by pretending to embrace the online world of user-generated content. So in writing about specific concerts that we play, I've generally waited until after they're over to post anything, and I don't think I've ever written anything that sounds like "run out and buy a ticket to this show right now."

That abundance of caution is taking the day off. If you're free tomorrow night, you need to run out and buy a ticket to our concert. (And you need to hurry, because a glance at our online ticketing system tells me that we don't seem to have many seats left.) Because what we're doing this week presents one of those rare chances to see something that you've probably never seen before in your life, and may never get a chance to see again.

Last summer, when I saw on our preliminary 2007-08 schedule that we would be mounting a two-week mini-festival of film music, I must admit that I didn't expect it to be a highlight of the year. Orchestras play movie music all the time these days, and too often, it's just an excuse to slap the "serious music" tag on something that's little more than a glorified pops concert. (I mean, honestly, I liked Pirates of the Caribbean, too, but that score is five minutes of cliched dreck repeated for two hours. And don't get me started on Lord of the Rings.) Seldom do you see an orchestra really make an effort to communicate just what it is about music and cinema that inspires such powerful emotion in us. It's not that we can't do it - it's that it's easier just to play Star Wars again, and the tickets cost the same either way.

But my cynicism proved to be unfounded this time. The centerpiece of our Sounds of Cinema festival (which does, yes, include a pops show hosted by George Takei of Star Trek fame) is a live performance of the complete scores to two classic silent films, as the movies play simultaneously on the big screen behind the orchestra. This week's flick is Charlie Chaplin's classic "Little Tramp" adventure, City Lights, which stands as one of the funniest and most poignant movies of all time, more than 75 years after it was made.

It's a huge undertaking to screen a film with a live orchestra providing the soundtrack, particularly when the score was composed specifically to complement Chaplin's side-splitting physical humor. It's not enough for the right tune to just more or less line up with the right scene - specific notes and phrases have to hit at the exact moment that the Little Tramp jumps in the air, or scratches his head, or tries to cope with a swallowed dog whistle. To that end, the conductor's score for this show (which is a whopping 455 pages, by the way - approximately equivalent to two of Mahler's longest symphonies) is filled not only with the usual staves of music, but with constant verbal cues as to what ought to be going on onscreen during any given measure. While leading us in what should sound like a normal performance, Osmo has to constantly dart his eyes between the score and the video monitor in front of his podium, making sure that his cues to us line up perfectly with instructions like "eyebrow lift," "taxi cab" and "fourth hiccup." If he misses a single cue, or fails to follow the exact tempo indicated for a given section, we'll be out of sync with the movie. Meanwhile, the hardest part for the orchestra is keeping our eyes on our parts and Osmo rather than twisting around to watch the screen.

We did the first performance of City Lights this morning, and judging from the waves of laughter rolling through the audience throughout, I think we hit our marks. Osmo really seems remarkably at ease with the score (although he did admit in rehearsal yesterday that "I have been practicing at home with a DVD, and I know it is the same movie, but this feels like a different version!"), and the music itself, which Chaplin wrote with the help of an orchestrator, is fantastic stuff, dipping and rolling all over the place and changing tempos ever so slightly to indicate when a character is getting tired, or drunk, or whatever.

The movie lasts just under 90 minutes, and with the exception of a 70-second stretch during which recorded sound effects take over for a particular Chaplin gag, the orchestra plays continuously for the entire length of the film. It's exhausting, but man, it's fun, and having watched City Lights several times before, I can honestly say that the live music is vastly superior to the tinny (and, frankly, not very well played) recorded version of Chaplin's score that accompanies the copy of the movie that you can watch at home.

If you really can't make it out to the Friday performance, or if big epic dramas are more your speed, come see us next Saturday, when we'll be rolling five or six Shostakovich symphonies into a massive live soundtrack to Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. I promise you won't regret it.