Here, the Music’s the Thing

It started out as an experiment to expand the audience for orchestral music, and it has mushroomed into the most ambitious project in years for the Pasadena Symphony: a semi-staged performance of Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” slated for Saturday at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

What’s more, this is not the traditional Mendelssohn “Midsummer” music that concert-goers are used to hearing--the familiar overture, Opus 21, or the incidental music, Opus 61, that the composer wrote for Shakespeare’s play. Instead, much of the evening will focus on Austrian emigre composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s adaptation of these and several other Mendelssohn works, originally scored for Warner Bros.’ 1935 film version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

And that’s just the orchestra side of things. Add to the mix actors, singers, dancers, two choirs, costumes and lighting effects.

According to Pasadena Symphony executive director Karine Beesley, the goal is to attract a new audience. “At least once a year, we are going to do something that is really interesting and different and says to people, we are not the same-old, same-old here,” she says. “In addition to hearing a really fine orchestra, you are going to see something that you would not normally see in a symphony concert hall.”

Adds the orchestra’s music director, Jorge Mester, who recently renewed his contract for another five years: “If a new conductor came, he would reinvent how the Pasadena Symphony works. Why don’t I reinvent it? In the sense of creating something like this presentation, in which we have a dramaturge who helps us put together things that are valuable as concert experiences, but outside the realm of overture-concerto-symphony.”

So Mester contacted actor-director John de Lancie (best known for his recurring role as Q on “Star Trek: The Next Generation”), an increasingly familiar figure on the American concert music scene and host of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s youth concerts for the past four years.

De Lancie, whose father played oboe in the Philadelphia Orchestra, believes that what makes “events” work on an orchestra program is “to put the onus on the material and to choose material specifically for that purpose.”

He is billed as creative director for this concert. De Lancie thought about staging Grieg’s incidental music for the play “Peer Gynt,” or combining various composers’ versions of “Romeo and Juliet,” but he decided to return to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which he had done before in the concert hall, mixing text and music. One such production, with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at this summer’s Ravinia Festival, received good notices. A different version, last fall, featuring the New York Philharmonic, “didn’t work at all,” in Mester’s estimation. He didn’t think that the text and music made a good enough fit--Mendelssohn’s version was written for a specific staging and it doesn’t cover all of the key characters and events.

The actor says he first started trimming Shakespeare into “a very lean script, which has all the characters and tells the story in a really straightforward way.” Then a friend told him about a recent recording of Korngold’s adaptation of Mendelssohn for the film score, “and, bingo, things began to drop into place really clearly.”

Korngold is well-known for his richly romantic scores for such 1930s and 1940s Warner Bros. swashbucklers as “Captain Blood,” “The Sea Hawk” and “The Adventures of Robin Hood.” But in the Hollywood of 1934, few--with the exception of the culturally enlightened who might have known his operas, such as “Violanta” and “Die tote Stadt”--were aware of him. He was a classical composer who had never worked in movies.

Max Reinhardt and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” changed that. In 1934, Reinhardt, a famed producer and director in Germany, came to L.A. to stage the Mendelssohn at the Hollywood Bowl--with Mickey Rooney as Puck and the Hollywood Hills as the fairy kingdom. Warner Bros. asked him to adapt his elaborate fantasy for the movies. But, says Korngold biographer Brendan G. Carroll, “Reinhardt realized that it wasn’t just a question of taking the Mendelssohn published score and putting it to the film. He needed somebody who was also a skilled composer.”

Korngold had already worked with Reinhardt, adapting two operettas, Strauss’ “Die Fledermaus” in 1929 and Offenbach’s “La Belle Helene” in 1930, in Berlin. Reinhardt insisted on Korngold as his musical collaborator, and the composer arrived in Hollywood in November 1934 to supervise music for the all-star production (featuring James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Dick Powell and Rooney, among others).

Korngold used the existing Mendelssohn “Midsummer” as far as it went, but its limitations in time (less than an hour) and content (no music for Act 1 or many other key spots throughout the play) became apparent. “There simply isn’t enough music for a 21/2-hour movie,” Carroll points out, “unless you just wanted to play things over and over again.”

But Korngold “had an encyclopedic knowledge of the repertoire,” Carroll says, and he drew on a variety of other Mendelssohn works ranging from the Scottish Symphony to “Songs Without Words” for piano.

“A lot of things he used were not well-known, but he knew which pieces to select that would go perfectly with whatever sequence he was scoring. And of course he completely overhauled them in various ways. He stitched all this together like a sort of Mendelssohn tapestry,” Carroll says.

Korngold wound up staying for six months, orchestrating every note himself and even “conducting” actors on the sound stage so their lines would be spoken, as he later wrote, “in the required rhythm” to match the music.

The film was a critical and commercial disappointment, but it did introduce Korngold to Hollywood. He would continue to travel between Vienna and Los Angeles for the next three years, before fleeing the Nazis and moving here permanently in 1938. Ultimately, he composed music for 18 more movies and won two Academy Awards. His film output would quickly overshadow his classical music, although there has been a resurgence of interest in all of Korngold’s music in recent years, resulting in dozens of new recordings.

Assembling the score for the Pasadena event turned out to be complicated, Mester says. The Mendelssohn music was readily available, but the Korngold score was not. The Warner Bros. archive at USC supplied copies of some of the original studio orchestrations, and the German Symphony Orchestra Berlin--which reconstructed about an hour of the Korngold adaptation for a 1997 concert and recording--supplied still more scores and musicians’ parts.

Mester and De Lancie also agreed that, in De Lancie’s words, “we should not be constrained by saying we will only follow what Korngold has done, or what Mendelssohn has done. Why don’t we do what both of these men had been asked to do themselves? Let the play dictate the music that we use.”

Adds Mester: “We decided to make our own show, taking music from here and from there. There’s a lot from the Korngold, but there’s also some treatment of similar themes in which we felt that [the original] Mendelssohn was more successful. We cut and we pasted.”

With the script and music in hand, De Lancie and Mester set about recruiting their cast: actors (including Kurtwood Smith of “That ‘70s Show” and Harry Groener of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), singers (tenor Michael Moore, soprano Michelle Culbertson, mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzman), a dancer (Brenda Matthews, playing Puck) and two choirs--the Pasadena Pro Musica and the Crown City Children’s Chorus.

According to De Lancie, the orchestra will occupy half the stage, the singers and actors the other half. “Movement will be extensive,” he promises. “Everybody is ‘off book’ [not holding scripts or scores], and everybody will be moving as if they were in a play. The focus will shift back and forth with the orchestra, when appropriate.” All will be in costume, and while there are no sets per se, lighting effects will help establish the Athenian court of Theseus and Hippolyta and the forest kingdom of Oberon and Titania.

De Lancie concedes that he is trying to shake up the status quo as well as bring new faces to the symphony audience. “I’m saying, listen, you’ve got a theater here,” he says. “You’ve got a stage. Let’s use this to the maximum. This is a very big show, it’s very complicated, and we are not going to attack it from the music world. We’re going to put an umbrella over that and apply well-tested theatrical rules of the road.

“There are going to be children as fairies. There’s going to be dancing, singing and acting. It’s a story of love and magic, and there’s an orchestra onstage. Short of the kitchen sink, it’s all there.”