A Fresh Take for Newman

Just as the current wave of classic-movie re-releases is letting fans see old films the way their creators intended, Randy Newman’s concert with the Pacific Symphony on Friday was a special treat because his songs were fleshed out with the rarely performed orchestral accompaniments from his original recordings.

Every Newman concert provides an object lesson in pop songwriting of the highest rank. A song of his such as “In Germany Before the War” is as richly evocative in its four minutes as a John Ford western, even when backed only by his piano.

The extra instrumental forces at his command at the Orange County Performing Arts Center added a whole new level of emotional resonance to this chilling portrait of a young girl’s murderer in pre-World War II Germany.

Fortunately, he didn’t give in to the temptation of using the orchestra on every tune simply because it was there.

“You Can Leave Your Hat On” needs nothing other than his relentlessly pulsing and bluesy piano to create its stabbingly funny portrait of a man who offers no apologies for his convention-defying views on love. (As an aside following the opening verse, Newman commented: “A long time ago when I wrote this, I thought of it as a joke, but the older I get, the more and more seriously I take it.”)

“I Love L.A.” and “Short People,” however, cried out for the extra kick they could only get from a rock band.

All those songs are staples of his more-common solo appearances; the highlights of Friday’s show were the ones that got full-blown orchestral treatments, if only because there are so few opportunities to hear them performed that way live.

In “Marie,” velvet-cloaked strings perfectly illuminated the dulled senses of the alcoholic narrator as he recounts the many wonderful qualities of the mate he so matter-of-factly ignores.

“Marie” was followed cannily by its thematic twin, “Real Emotional Girl,” about a young woman whose spirit has withered in the absence of true affection. The orchestra supplied languorous, yearning phrases that a piano alone couldn’t mimic.

Back-to-back renditions of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” the winsome theme song he wrote for “Toy Story,” and “Love Story,” from his 1968 debut album, demonstrated the joyful side of his psyche that he allows out in the sunshine once every blue moon or so.

One such occasion came between numbers on Friday, when he noted his pleasure at having an orchestra at his disposal. Thanking the audience for supporting the group, he said, “I don’t like a whole lot of things--including my own family--but I love an orchestra. To be in front of an orchestra is better than just about anything I can think of.”

He took advantage of the opportunity and played four songs from that first effort, which may be the most dependent on rich arrangements of any of his albums.

Of those, “Cowboy” and “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today” are vignettes of deserted human landscapes that haven’t lost an ounce of their power over three decades. “Davy the Fat Boy,” meanwhile, is a masterwork in miniature of human greed and cruelty. It tells of a man who is entrusted with the care of a child by his mother and father before their deaths, and who promptly turns the overweight kid into a circus side-show attraction (“Can you guess what he weigh folks? Can you guess what he weigh? You know it’s only a quarter . . . “). Like Mark Twain at his best, it is achingly funny yet painfully revealing.

The set list for Newman’s solo shows doesn’t vary greatly from show to show or from year to year, so his collaboration with the Pacific gave a more expansive view of his multifaceted career as a singer, songwriter and composer of music for film and, as of 1995, musical theater (he sang just one tune from “Randy Newman’s Faust”).

In the first of two nights with the orchestra, Newman spent part of the 90-minute performance conducting excerpts from his scores for “Avalon,” “Toy Story” and “The Natural.”

They nicely complemented the opening 30-minute segment of film music by Randy’s famous composer uncle, Alfred Newman.

The Pacific’s regular pops conductor, Richard Kaufman, led snippets from Alfred’s scores from movies including “How the West Was Won,” “Captain from Castile,” “Airport” and “David and Bathsheba.”

Randy Newman appeared genuinely humbled by the consistent quality of his uncle’s work, (which, Kaufman noted, netted him 45 career Academy Award nominations), even on some less-than-magnificent films. He quipped, “Thank God they didn’t play anything from ‘Wuthering Heights’ and ‘How Green Was My Valley’ or I’d have been afraid to come out at all.”