Mona Lisa ‘Smile’

The stately Royal Festival Hall is home to the London Philharmonic Orchestra, where gray-haired patrons can often be found at intermission gazing through four stories of windows that overlook the muddy River Thames barely 30 yards away.

As the site of the annual Meltdown Festival and other cutting-edge cultural events, the hall is equally at home with black-clad trendies and spiky-haired punks in their 20s and 30s within its elegant wood-paneled interior.

The twain rarely meet, yet Friday they did.

What brought them together was Brian Wilson’s long-lost “Smile,” the album that was to give the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” a run for its money as rock’s next conceptual masterpiece.

Even a bitter mid-February wind whipping off the Thames couldn’t cool the warmth or electric excitement in the air for fans, many of whom had waited nearly four decades to hear “Smile.” The first of at least a dozen standing ovations broke out when Wilson’s “Smile” collaborator, lyricist Van Dyke Parks, simply took his seat in the audience.

We’ll never know whether the “Smile” album would have changed the course of pop music history, as supporters have argued for decades, had Wilson not scrapped it in 1967 amid criticism from the other Beach Boys and Capitol Records.

What we do know now is that Wilson and Parks created a glorious piece of music whose grand ambition is outstripped only by its inherent beauty and cumulative power.

Hearing “Smile” in its entirety, it’s hard not to believe that this tapestry of Americana, rife with melodic, harmonic, instrumental and lyric invention, wouldn’t have elevated the Beach Boys to a new level of respect on the heels of their critically acclaimed but commercially disappointing “Pet Sounds” album.

With “Pet Sounds” in 1966, Wilson and lyricist Tony Asher led the Beach Boys out of adolescence into the realm of adult cares and emotions, thanks to songs such as “God Only Knows.”

“Smile” indeed moves on to the next plateau, in large part because of the depth of Parks’ often impressionistic lyrics, with a large-scale composition that today sounds smart, sophisticated and, yes, even relevant.

As performed by Wilson and his infinitely resourceful 10-piece band, with extra help from the nine-member Stockholm Strings and Horns, “Smile” unfurled in gorgeous, witty, sonorous depth.

Wilson, at 61, has lost much of the richness, range and vibrancy his soaring voice had in his 20s. Yet this veteran of the emotional battlefield, who often has appeared shell-shocked in concert, seemed spiritually renewed and remarkably animated and engaged during the 45-minute presentation of “Smile,” the centerpiece of a career-spanning performance that ran nearly three hours.

The songs of “Smile” invoke a spirit of the American frontier that was one component of the ‘60s counterculture revolution, which also incorporated a quest for spiritual enlightenment.

Wilson immediately transports listeners onto a transcendent plane with “Smile’s” opening number, “Our Prayer.” This wordless, a cappella vocal workout, featuring as many as nine voices singing tightly interwoven lines, opens with an ominous minor chord and travels through a panoply of complex harmonies before resolving in a magnificent major chord, a virtual overture for the musical journey that follows.

“Smile,” which existed all these years only in recorded bits and pieces, has been sewn together as a three-movement suite that adapts classical principles of theme, variation, development and recapitulation to a pop music vocabulary.

Wilson also applies aural colors with a painterly hand, as if taking Phil Spector’s monolithic and monochromatic wall of sound as a starting point and expanding it with the full spectrum of rock and orchestral timbres.

In “Cabinessence,” Wilson sings of “the time for a change” while conjuring a feeling of the Old West with a lightly plucked banjo and crisscrossing melodic arcs played on melodica and harmonica. The ambling verse abruptly gives way to a raucous Texas twister of thick, bottom-heavy sound as the massed voices sing “Who ran the iron horse?” The parallel with the ‘60s upsurge in environmentalism against encroaching industry is hard to miss.

The imagery Parks uses in “Surf’s Up” is open to myriad interpretations, but set against the milieu of social upheaval from which it sprang, it’s not difficult to read it as a commentary on the institution and traditions that were crumbling in post-Eisenhower America.

Wilson and Parks celebrate innocence and mourn its loss in “Wonderful,” a second-movement ballad in which Wilson abandons the fundamental musical notion of key signature, giving his rambling melody the complete sense of freedom of the mysterious female in the song.

Such freedom, “Smile” suggests, can follow one of two paths: up to human liberation and transcendent happiness or down to anarchy and misery. The latter is the direction things appear to be heading in the third movement, which erupts in sonic chaos with “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow.”

Just as the world seems headed to hell in a handcart -- an added segue finds Wilson singing “Is it hot as hell in here or is it me?” -- the music asks for redemption with a return to “Our Prayer,” then explodes in joy with “Good Vibrations.”

Placing “Good Vibrations” at the end lets “Smile” live up to its title in the most ebullient fashion and makes perhaps the most persuasive argument for the “hippie dream” of the ‘60s: that music and love really do have the power to transform the world.

The premiere of “Smile” clearly transformed the vast majority of the nearly 3,000 fans on hand, who gave Wilson a five-minute ovation at the end.

About a dozen rows from the stage, Beach Boys biographer David Leaf stood among the overwhelmed fans who lingered in the hall after the performance and said simply, “This is beyond all expectations.”

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What other critics say about ‘Smile’

Here is what London critics had to say Saturday about the “Smile” concert:

“Groundbreaking complexity and sophistication .... Last night was about much more than respectful nostalgia ... [the premiere performance of ‘Smile’] made it seem like the grandest of American symphonies and Wilson the national heir to Charles Ives.”

Michael Hann

The Guardian

“Merely an interesting footnote ... [A] 40-minute crazy-paving collage of song fragments and loony-tunes jingles all bookended by the lush glory of ‘Heroes & Villains’ and ‘Good Vibrations.’ With its baroque rock opera trimmings and barnyard animal grunts, much of it also sounded like whimsical juvenilia.... It was clearly adventurous for its era, but it is not difficult to see why Wilson’s label and fellow Beach Boys balked at releasing it.”

Stephen Dalton

Times of London

“Nothing could prepare us for [‘Smile’] ... the music echoed everything from Philip Glass to Kurt Weill to Chuck Berry.... Leonard Bernstein said Brian Wilson was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century. He was not wrong.”

Joe Muggs

Daily Telegraph