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Photograph by Alise O'Brien, courtesy of SLSO
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There’s something about those whales flying through the air in the film Fantasia 2000, says St. Louis Resident Conductor Steven Jarvi.
“I would have never have set [Respighi’s] Pines of Rome to these stoic animals, like the whales they use,” he said. “There’s a majesty about them that’s really moving. They soar through the air toward the sun. I don’t know what it means, but it’s the best of Disney grandeur.”
Jarvi conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in a special Disney Fantasia concert this weekend (www.slso.org, November 1 to 3) featuring scenes from Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 screened to live orchestral accompaniment. The august SLSO will crank out works by Beethoven, Debussy, Tchaikovsky and other composers in service to our national mouse, Mickey. (Audience members are invited to dress as their favorite Disney characters and enter the symphony’s costume contest before each performance, too.)
Prior to conducting these shows, Jarvi has immersed himself in the films and their lore.
“For the original Fantasia, Leopold Stokowski conducted the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, and the sequel was James Levine conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra,” he said. “We’ll do Beethoven’s Sixth from the original –
that’s the one set in an ancient Greek fantasyland with minotaurs and faeries and Zeus tossing lightning bolts… For Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance march they have Donald Duck on Noah’s ark. Donald deals with some craziness, but eventually comes out okay. We have some of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker in there, too.”
The big challenge is matching the scores with the films precisely, so that every dramatic/comedic high point in the movie arrives at the same time as the appropriate musical cue.
“You need to have that sound of thunder right when Zeus throws that thunderbolt, right? That’s the most important element of the show to me,” said the maestro. “I’ll have a click track in my ear that has little editorial dots that come every four beats or so, and these streamers that come across a little TV screen I can see when there’s a big moment coming. Learning the click track and the streamers is very, very challenging…The symphony can play Pines of Rome all day long, but playing them at an exact tempo with no flexibility becomes a big challenge. I have to restrain myself from taking any liberties with the score.”
But, Jarvi added, all this is, in its way, par for the course.
“Don’t forget Powell Hall was originally a movie house,” he said.
The big name for the opening-night keynote presentation at the 35th annual St. Louis Jewish Book Festival (November 3 through 17) is thespian Harvey Fierstein. Hearing his astonishingly gravelly, scratchy voice live in the gymnasium at the Jewish Community Center in Creve Coeur should be a treat.
Another big draw will be Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, whose book about the complicity of civilian Germans in the Holocaust, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, became an international bestseller some years ago. His new one, The Devil That Never Dies: The Rise and Threat of Global Anti-Semitism, has been called a tour-de-force for its careful examination of the scapegoating of Jews over the millennia.
A lighter tome, Oliver Horovitz’s An American Caddie in St. Andrews is surely the only memoir by a Jewish caddie who plied Scotland’s fabled links. Mark Cohen’s Overweight Sensation: The Life & Comedy of Allan Sherman is the first biography of the “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” novelty singer. Glen Berger’s Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway Historyis a look at the folly of the musical noted for endless delays and not a few injured actors, by one of its writers. Fred Stoller’s Maybe We’ll Have You Back: The Life of a Perennial TV Guest Star is a memoir by a guy who’s guest-starred on a laundry list of sitcoms, including Seinfeld and Friends. (His descriptions in the book of the joys of the catered-food tables that actors nosh from are a hoot.)
Renowned foreign correspondent Martin Fletcher has written a novel, Jacob’s Oath, about a man seeking vengeance on the sadistic concentration-camp guard who killed his brother. Novelist Michael Lavigne’s new one, The Wanting, explores the mentality of an Israeli father injured in a terrorist attack, his 13-year old daughter longing for spiritual fulfillment, and a young Palestinian bomber seeking a martyr’s reward. Other fiction includes Jillian Cantor’s Margot, which imagines that Anne Frank’s sister survives the Holocaust and winds up in America. Austin Ratner’s In the Land of the Living uses a cross-country family road trip as the framework for a meditation on fathers and sons. Jeffrey Stepakoff’s The Melody of Secrets is a treacherous love story about a beautiful German violin virtuoso and an American fighter pilot who meet in the final days of WWII and reconnect later in a love triangle fraught with espionage, in the U.S. space program.
Nonfiction is the star of the show at the Book Fest, and this year’s highlights include appearances by Lynn Povich, author of The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace, about a 1975 lawsuit in which 46 female employees filed a class-action suit charging discrimination in hiring and promotion against the magazine. Povich shot from secretary to the first female senior editor in the magazine’s history. Bill Minutaglio, Steven L. Davis and Richard Marcus present Dallas 1963, which, published 50 years after the Kennedy assassination, delves into “the people, power, and politics in Dallas that created the stage for tragedy” and fostered a “climate of hatred that led many to blame the city for the president’s death.”
Co-founder of Ms. Magazine Letty Cottin Pogrebin has authored How to Be a Friend to a Friend Who’s Sick, about the mechanics of empathy for those cursed with cancer and similar ailments. Local author Pat Lorraine Simons’ Brothers on the Run: Fleeing Hitler, Fighting Franco is the true story of the author’s father and uncle, Jewish teenagers who “barely escape death at the Nazis’ hands in pre-World War II Europe only to find themselves crisscrossing the continent as refugees living on luck, daring, and wits.” Neil Barofsky, a former Special Inspector General who oversaw the spending of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund, has written Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street, “an insider’s play-by-play of what went wrong during the Great Recession rescue and why the banks have only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the crisis.”
The Festival always includes a live performance or two, and this year look for “An Evening at the Ballet,” with scenes from classic and modern works performed by the Saint Louis Ballet at the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center, and “David Halen’s Favorites,” in which the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra Concertmaster plays works by Tchaikovsky and other heavy dudes on his fiddle, in collaboration with a band of fellow SLSO musicians at Washington University’s 560 Music Center in the Delmar Loop.
