“Magic” is a word much bandied about by those involved with the Walt Disney Company and its many offshoots.
These days, it refers most often to technology – the mechanical engineering (“imagineering,” to use the term preferred by Disney, Inc.) that goes into fashioning everything from the now-antique animatronics of the original Disneyland to the high-tech whizbangs of the Epcot Center, to on-stage trickery that transforms a beast into a prince.
But there are still some aspects of “the Disney magic” that are, well, magical. The way, for example, that a simple blend of sound and picture can call forth a full range of emotions from a room full of people.
Case in point: Saturday evening’s performance by the Tulsa Symphony Orchestra of “The Magical Music of Disney,” a concert featuring orchestral suites drawn from some of the studio’s best-known animated films, accompanied by still and moving images from those films.
The Chapman Music Hall was, for all intents and purposes, filled to capacity for this show. And my seat just happened to be set amidst a range of generations.
Behind me was a young fellow who clearly, though not distractingly, announced the name of every character he recognized on the large screen above the orchestra. During the suite from “The Little Mermaid,” he happily informed those around him that we were watching Ariel, Prince Eric, King Triton, Ursula and Sebastian.
In front of me was a group of women of a certain age, one of whom, as “The Little Mermaid” suite came to a close with images of a father saying goodbye to a daughter, discreetly dabbed away a tear.
Disney’s best products appeal to the sentimentalist in all of us, to that part of us still capable of believing the world is filled with wonders, that doing good will be properly rewarded, that friends never let you down, that “happily ever after” is always possible.
But the Disney magic works best when it is presented all of a piece. I doubt “The Magical Music of Disney” would have had quite the same impact if the music had been performed without the images. As the concert’s program notes stated, “the success of these films is in large part due to the successful matching of musical score to the on-screen image.”
That’s especially true of some of the most recent films, which rely more on radio-friendly pop songs that, in the context of these orchestral suites, were at once the most familiar and the least effective tunes of the suite.
But the Tulsa Symphony’s playing, under the direction of guest conductor James Bagwell, was as lush and dramatic, lively and comic as one could want. The evening required the orchestra to handle a variety of styles, from the faux-African percussion of the Orchestral Suite from “Hercules,” which then segued into a Motown-like rhythm & blues vamp, to the old-fashioned Broadway style sweep of the music from “Beauty and the Beast”; from the Eastern-tinged tunes of “Mulan” to the soaring score of “The Rescuers Down Under.”
KTUL personality Kristin Dickerson served as the evening’s narrator, introducing each selection.
