Bringing theatrics to the orchestra

The Walt Disney Concert Hall can be a spectacular place in which to hear an orchestra. Its new, unique, vital architecture and acoustics can refresh a 19th century symphony and feel just right for a 21st century one. Moreover, it invites, even demands, the next step, the Los Angeles Philharmonic logically thinks. Now is the time to reinvent the concert.

Paradoxically, though, Disney is the most traditional, the most conservative of concert halls. It loves music, dislikes the spoken word, fights amplification and hates video screens. Lighting tricks cheapen it. And, in fact, until Thursday night, the Philharmonic’s ballyhooed reinvention stratagem had consisted of little more than a bland “First Nights” series and uninspired youth concerts.

But Thursday, to climax its Berlioz Festival, the orchestra turned to an innovative British theater artist, Simon McBurney, who had already demonstrated a fresh approach to the presentation of the string quartet. “Noise of Time,” by McBurney’s terrific company, Complicite, was built around a performance of Shostakovich’s 15th String Quartet by the Emerson String Quartet. It proved both revelatory music-making and brilliant theater when it was presented at UCLA two years ago.

Esa-Pekka Salonen wanted something similar for Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,” and he put the intrepid Philharmonic at McBurney’s disposal. As the composer Gerard McBurney -- the director’s brother and a collaborator on the project -- explained at a talk Thursday before the concert, the whole thing seemed, at first thought, undoable. Working intimately and rehearsing extensively with a string quartet was challenge enough. It is another level of difficulty to slip a theatrical concept into standard orchestral concert life. Still, the idea of putting the “trip” back into the first psychedelic symphony -- and in a trippy concert hall -- proved irresistible, he said.

But that was one trip too many.

With “Strange Poetry: Berlioz and the Chemistry of Dreams,” the McBurneys did indeed come up with a clever and original way to look at a revolutionary work too often taken for granted. The “Symphonie Fantastique” is the product of a young composer’s feverish imagination. Intoxicated by the fervor of French Romanticism and infatuated with an English actress, Berlioz intended his symphony to reveal the state of delirium this overeager young artist might attain were he to smoke too much opium. Premiered in 1830, only three years after the death of Beethoven, it heralded a whole new kind of Romanticism. Leonard Bernstein called it a portrait of a nervous wreck.

Two years after premiering this symphony, Berlioz presented it with an odd sequel, “Lelio,” in which the artist, now Hamlet-obsessed, returns to life and tries to write a masterpiece. An actor declaims long, flamboyantly bad speeches while performers hidden behind a curtain offer a miscellany of short works -- songs and choral and orchestral pieces. There has probably never been anything so anticlimactic in all music.

McBurney’s interesting conceit was to turn everything around by beginning with “Lelio.” After reciting a short reverse timeline from the present to the birth of Berlioz (with dutiful acknowledgments of Philip Glass, Jimi Hendrix, Freud and the first X-ray of a woman’s hand), McBurney recited shortened English translations of Lelio’s speeches along with some Berlioz letters that further revealed the composer’s attractively excitable nature. Orchestra, chorus, soloists and piano accompanist did their business behind a scrim on which were projected art-class slides of gargoyles and paintings by Delacroix.

The result was a sonic and visual mess. Disney still awaits technology that can solve its amplification problems. The miking of McBurney was echoey, sometimes indistinct, always unpleasant. A cough in the audience could drown out a word or two. The scrim itself was beautiful, but the projections on it were hokey. Worse, this was still a proscenium-driven show. McBurney faced forward. People seated on the sides had to settle for small projections on walls. I was told it didn’t work well upstairs.

Behind the scrim, members of the Pacific Chorale walked as if on eggs trying not to make noise; their singing sounded equally tentative. Music making seemed muffled behind the scrim and in dim light. Some of that effect may have been psychological, but placing a singer and piano at the far rear of the stage was not ideal, and tenor Eric Cutler overcompensated in his song to texts from “Hamlet.” Kyle Ketelsen was the baritone soloist in the “Song of the Brigands,” merry pirate music. Pianist Bryan Pezzone was the accompanist.

McBurney dropped the fantasy on “The Tempest” with which Berlioz ended “Lelio” and concluded instead with “Symphonie Fantastique” as symbol of an artist’s coming of age. The performance was full of theatrical and lighting contrivances. Actors were seated among the players and occasionally stood and drew attention to themselves. Instruments floated into space. Throughout, an Andy Warhol-like film showed the artist asleep, dreaming his nightmares.

Some of these theatrical conceits distracted from an exciting performance of the symphony in which Salonen really did emphasize just how bizarre Berlioz’s sound can be. Other devices, though, were inspired. The most startling was having the players turn forward and face the audience as they played (which required them to memorize passages of the score). It was also highly effective to have members of the orchestra stand to play solo passages. Berlioz’s blaring brass is even more exciting when the players rise. And what a treat to have, for the “Witches’ Sabbath” movement, real bells -- magnificent to look at and hear. A reverse-timeline filmed collage, synchronized to the ending of the symphony, was impressively done but old hat.

Ultimately, I thought that “Strange Poetry” added less to the experience of Berlioz than it subtracted, but the audience was enthusiastic. The turning and standing tricks and their liberating effect on the playing are what I’d like to see further explored in Disney, but I won’t hold my breath. If the grapevine is to be believed, memorizing their parts did not go over especially well with the musicians.

*

Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Today and Sunday, 2 p.m.

Price: $15-$120

Contact: (323) 850-2000