Volume 25 Issue 6 - March 2020

FOR OPENERS | DAVID PERLMAN
If All the World’s a Stage ...
Two pm this past February 8 was a Saturday afternoon, and my
concert companion and I had barely had time to settle into our
Roy Thomson Hall balcony seats with our beer and popcorn
before the lights, already dim, dipped even more, and a fractional
moment of quiet rippled across the cheerful din of the place, the way
a passing cloud wiping the face of the sun high above a summer lake
evokes a moment’s hush.
(You can always tell it’s February in Toronto when people like me
distract themselves from a task at hand by starting to talk, out of
nowhere, about the summer.)
Where was I? Ah yes. February 8, about four minutes past 2pm, in
the balcony level of Toronto’s most imposing cultural hall of mirrors.
The momentary hush that descended on the room when the lights
flickered is turning into a ripple of applause as our conductor for the
day, Jack Everly, strides briskly onto the stage.
If it’s less of a ripple of applause than one might reliably expect at
that moment in the concert ritual, it’s certainly not because the crowd
is smaller than usual – the place is, as far as I can tell from where I
am sitting, pretty much its usual respectably crowded self. And it’s
not because the audience is already settling morosely into an appropriate
frame of mind for something portentous – there’s a palpable
buzz and hum in the air. Mostly it’s less of a ripple than one might
have expected, because the logistics of applause are complicated with
a beer in one hand and popcorn in the other.
Toronto Symphony Orchestra members already seated on stage do
their usual decorous bit to salute the maestro as he enters – they tap
their bows carefully on their instruments; stamp their feet in a refined
(and of course rhythmic) way; there are smiles all round.
Everly strides to the front of the stage, all affable business, picks
up a microphone that just happens to be there, and invites us all to
have a good time, cheer for our heroes if we feel like it, laugh or cry
if we want to, and applaud or not as the mood strikes. And then, all
business, he turns to the orchestra, all attention. The lights take a
deeper dive, a deeper hush descends. He raises his baton … and the
movie begins.
Calling it a “movie” in these splendid surrounds is, I readily
concede, not the most formal way of addressing it. Film With
Orchestra is how it’s titled on the cover of the TSO program book I
picked up on my way out of the hall (I had a hand free by then).
Mind you, that’s not what it’s called inside the program. On subsequent
closer inspection, on the page with the official production
credits for the highly successful road show, it is styled A Symphonic
Night at the Movies which neatly captures the middle-brow appeal of
the thing: neither film as art nor “a flick at the bioscope,” as I would
have called it as a nine-year-old child in 1962 (in another country) ten
years after this particular movie was made.
Whatever one calls it, film with orchestra has become, for a whole
bunch of reasons, a hybrid genre that is much in vogue. The TSO,
for example, does four of them a year in its own season. Three of
them, this season (two Star Wars movies and Home Alone, which
has become a perennial Christmas holiday offering), are branded
showcases for the astonishing film score output of composer John
Williams. The fourth generally digs into film classics: last year it was,
if I remember, Casablanca. Today it is 1952’s Singin’ In the Rain, starring
Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds.
I understand the appeal. For movie fans it’s a chance to get under the
hood of an aspect of movie-making normally hidden from view. For
millions of people, for whom orchestral scores, consciously or unconsciously,
are intrinsic to the way we are programmed daily as to what to
feel and think, it’s a revelation to see how the all-too-familiar sounds
are made: a bit like actually seeing milk come from a cow rather than
from a carton on a shelf. I like to think there are favourable statistics out
there concerning how many people who came primarily for the novelty
value of seeing a favourite film in a new context discover the orchestra
as something worth revisiting in its own right.
As for die-hard fans of the orchestra, it’s a chance to spend time in
the hall, indulging a passion, without any of the usual self-appointed
distractions of having to instruct less couth patrons in the etiquette of
cultural palaces – a chance to let our hair down, so to speak.
So I was expecting to have fun, and would have, even without
the popcorn and beer. What I wasn’t expecting was the way this
particular film in this context has stayed with me for the past few
weeks, taking on an aesthetic shape and colour: posing questions
Upcoming Dates & Deadlines for our April 2020 edition
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6pm Tuesday March 17
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Publication Date
Tuesday March 24 (online)
Friday March 27 (print)
Volume 25 No 7 “APRIL 2020”
will list events
April1, 2020 to May 7, 2020
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