The question of concert vs. movie apparently never worried the woman sitting in front of me - the poor thing had mistaken Verizon Hall for her living room. Kicking off shoes and setting stocking feet atop the first-tier railing made for a curious bit of social slouching not likely to be tolerated by any parent at one of the orchestra's family concerts.
Audiences had better get used to more "event" elements' entering the concert realm. Management even aims to bring the circus to town, literally, in case the orchestra on stage isn't enough to get you there. This West Side Story, though, was an absolutely legitimate artistic project. For one thing, Philadelphia can take a special interest in Bernstein, who went to the Curtis Institute of Music, where the culture is now catching up with the composer/conductor's prescient acts of career invention and commingling of classical with popular.
The tunes and even the ensemble itself reflect Bernstein's catholic style, which embraced a sweetness at one end ("I Feel Pretty") that could have been penned by a slightly more evolved Franz Lehar, and at the other had menacingly quiet drums and scattershot dissonance echoing through gorgeously bleak shots of New York squalor. The orchestra was augmented by seven freelancers with show chops, most notable a terrific trumpeter, Matt Gallagher, who belted out high notes of steel.
The orchestration is a story in itself. Materials for the original film score were lost, so what's heard in this concert presentation, which has toured nationally, is from neither the film nor the musical, but from an amalgam of sources located by composer Eleonor Sandresky, overseen by Garth Edwin Sunderland, and ultimately credited to five orchestrators. It is superb, and must be considered, along with Jerome Robbins' choreography and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics, a primary source of genius and pleasure.
Opera and ballet, after all, ask audiences to make decisions about whether to look or listen, crawl inside the heads of characters, or heed the score. West Side Story has elements of both. Technology did the job of lifting and preserving vocals of the original soundtrack. Recalling, if just a bit, Fred Astaire's posthumous dance in a vacuum cleaner commercial, conductor David Newman synced up the ensemble with Wood (Maria), Richard Beymer (Tony), Rita Moreno (Anita) - or, rather, with the real singers whose dubbing jobs went uncredited - as timed markers wiped across a small screen beneath him. The sound quality of the recording, and the voices themselves, didn't come up to the full-spectrum sound of the orchestra, but you understood why this was a project worth doing when the love-addled "Tonight" is joined by the racing exhilarant of the orchestra. Juliette Kang, sitting concertmaster for the night, entered with a brief and touching solo at the end of the balcony scene. Hornist Jeffrey Lang - an orchestra member, but with an impressive Broadway resumé - was as lithe and emotional as any singer.
Two 12-year-old boys I know told me afterward they had a tough time waiting through "all that singing" for the next rumble. Gangs and knives? For some orchestra fans, this was a star turn for an important score, with a dim rectangle flickering somewhere off in the distance.
Contact Peter Dobrin at pdobrin@phillynews.com or 215-854-5611. Read his blog at www.philly.com/artswatch.
