Santa Rosa Symphony concerts salute Hollywood

With the Golden Globe awards in the rearview mirror and the Oscar nominations approaching this Tuesday, it’s high season for streaming and scheming about which award-worthy movie to watch next.

The Santa Rosa Symphony joins in the cinematic celebration Saturday through Monday, when it unspools the third in a series of “Rach and the Hollywood Sound” concert programs at the Green Music Center’s Weill Hall on the Sonoma State University campus.

The programs are the brainchild of Music Director Francesco Lecce-Chong, who will open the concert with suites from three iconic films whose composers and directors took a risky, collaborative plunge: Bernard Herrmann’s Suite from Hitchcock’s “Psycho” for Orchestra, John Williams’ Three Pieces from Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” for Solo Violin and Orchestra and Maurice Jarre’s Suite from David Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia” for Orchestra, which won an Academy Award for best score.

“Each of the films is completely different,” Lecce-Chong said. “I wanted to show how all these incredible composers are able to conjure up a place or a setting or a character. It takes the highest level of skill.”

After intermission, the orchestra will tackle Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3, a work that was written about 30 years after his Symphony No. 2 (1906-1907), which the orchestra performed last season.

“I always think of Rachmaninoff, even from his early days, as a thoroughly modern composer,” Lecce-Chong said. “He is really trying to create the one-arc symphony, which he finds ways of doing in each piece he wrote.”

The first installment of the “Rach and the Hollywood Sound” series debuted in March 2022 with Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1 and will conclude next season with his “Symphonic Dances,” the Russian composer’s final work written in 1940.

“What’s fun about doing these four Rachmanionoff symphonic works is that they are all completely different,” Lecce-Chong said. “The first symphony is pure bravado. The second drips with Romanticism and in the third, he really explores the orchestra … next season, in the ‘Symphonic Dances,’ you will see how he ties it all together. “

The Symphony No. 3 is more compact than Rachmaninoff’s first two symphonies, with only three movements. In the second movement, he combines both the slow and fast movements together.

“The first movement starts quietly … he likes these long introductions. It’s epic and prolonged and very difficult to sustain,” Lecce-Chong said. “The third movement is his go-to, exciting, really virtuosic side.”

The premiere of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 was given by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski in 1938, then revised and reintroduced later that year by the orchestra under the baton of Eugene Ormandy.

If you’d like to familiarize yourself with the work, Lecce-Chong suggests listening to the original, old-school recording by Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Then cue up the 2023 recording that is part of a new cycle of his works by the Philadelphia Orchestra under its current Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

“In the original, there’s a rawness there, which is amazing,” Lecce-Chong said. “So you can compare and contrast them.”

To introduce the three film suites that make up the first half of the concert, Lecce-Chong plans to “talk and walk” the audience through each score and how it evolved, providing a glimpse into the fragility of the creative process.

“There were a lot of risks involved for both the film directors and composers,” he said. “The idea is not to showcase each film individually, but to see through them how three composers work, so to compare and contrast them.”

Lecce-Chong chose to perform the longer, 15-minute suites so that the audience can get a wider view than the usual five-minute themes that are heard frequently at pops concerts.

“Visually, it’s going to be a stunning change onstage,” Lecce-Chong said. “In ‘Psycho,’ it’s just a string orchestra, and then more people will come onstage for ‘Schindler’s List,’ and then it’s like the cavalry arrives when we get to ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’”

Although the marriage of Hitchcock’s 1960 “Psycho” and Herrmann’s score written for strings only has been described as a perfect union, the creative process itself was a bit messy.

“Hitchcock was trying to do a budget movie, and Herrmann had always written for a big orchestra,” Lecce-Chong said. “And (the music in) the most iconic moment (the shower scene) happened by accident … Hitchcock wanted that scene to be silent.”

Once he heard the squeaky, high-pitched glissandos that Herrmann wrote, however, Hitchcock realized that the music not only improved but transformed the scene, drawing the audience into what the characters were feeling.

The score to Lean’s 1962 “Lawrence of Arabia” also started out on footing as shaky as the film’s perilous quicksand scene. Experienced British composer Malcolm Arnold was asked to write the score, along with well-known classical composer William Walton.

“It should have been a dream scenario,” Lecce-Chong said. “But Arnold and Walton saw the film, hated it and refused to write the music.”

So Lean and his team turned to Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, whose assistant was the young French composer, Maurice Jarre, an unknown at the time.

When the directors didn’t like what Rodgers wrote, Jarre shared a snippet he had been playing around with as a theme. As soon as Lean heard that tune, he asked Jarre to write the entire score.

Williams, known as the “maestro of movie scores,” was initially hesitant to accept the challenge of writing the score to Spielberg’s 1993 “Schindler’s List.” As the story goes, he went to his longtime collaborator Spielberg and asked if another composer might be better.

According to Lecce-Chong, Spielberg replied something to the effect of, “Yes, they would be, but they are all dead.”

The composer ended up producing one of Hollywood’s most hauntingly beautiful scores to capture the story rooted in the Holocaust, one of the darkest chapters in history.

In the original film, the violin solo part was played by Israeli-American violinist Itzhak Perlman, whose sweet tone and expressive playing adds even more poignancy to the score.

“As a three-movement work, it’s a beautiful violin concerto,” Lecce-Chong said. “You get to hear the klezmer style and a lot of virtuosic solo violin playing that you never hear.”

Concertmaster Joe Edelberg, who will perform the solo violin part, has been listening to Perlman’s version and learning from it while striving to find his own sound.

“It’s beautiful writing and very gratifying for the player,” he said. “It’s got to be truthful, and that’s what I have been looking for … finding the truth in myself.”

Over the past few seasons, Edelberg said, he has been enjoying the unusual pairing of Rachmaninoff’s major orchestral works with the film music from some of Hollywood’s finest composers.

“It seems very appropriate to me because the Rachmaninoff is so full of dramatic effects,” he said. “It’s really spectacular writing and a wide range of emotions.”

However, the technique required by the Rachmaninoff works can be relentlessly demanding for the orchestra musicians.

“The fast movements need to feel very light,” Lecce-Chong said. “It’s really loud, but everybody has to be so nimble. You have to keep it transparent enough to feel like a dance … when it’s done well, it’s really exhilarating.”