Loony Tunes

Bugs as "Leopold"

Who: The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Daugherty
What: Bugs Bunny at the Symphony
Where: Powell Symphony Hall, St. Louis
When: September 10 and 11, 2011

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I don’t know about anyone else, but my first exposure to classical music came from watching Saturday morning cartoons. Bits of Franz von Suppé’s overtures, in particular, were drilled into my subconscious whilst chortling at the antics of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Wile E. Coyote on our family’s old black and white Philco.

This past weekend guest conductor George Daugherty and the St. Louis Symphony offered an opportunity to return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, to paraphrase another major media influence from childhood. Created by Mr. Daugherty as a sequel to his 1990 Bugs Bunny on Broadway, Bugs Bunny at the Symphony features timeless (and a few not-so-timeless) Warner Brothers cartoons in which classical music played an important part. There were a few misses among the hits, but on the whole the program was good, family-friendly fun, with enough variety to keep both the kids and us aging Boomers entertained. At a little over two hours with intermission, however, it might have been a bit long for some of the younger audience members.

The Warner team produced around 1400 cartoons during the golden years of hand-drawn animation in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. They all had non-stop soundtracks that mixed themes from the classics with period pop songs and original material. Those arrangements, including most of the original tunes, were the work of the remarkable Carl Stalling, a Missouri native son who was once the resident organist at the old St. Louis Theatre—which is now Powell Hall. One could almost sense the ghost of the late Mr. Stallings smiling happily as the symphony zipped through his scores for “Rhapsody Rabbit” and “Baton Bunny” (among others) with stunning precision while Bugs cavorted on the screen overhead in crisp, digitally restored prints of the original ‘toons.

He would have been equally happy, I think, with the snappy orchestra-only performances of Smetana’s “Dance of the Comedians” from The Bartered Bride and von Suppé’s overture to The Beautiful Galatea, which opened the first and second halves of the program. Yes, the winds were a bit overpowering, but in a way that’s appropriate. The definitive Warner Brothers movie sound was always artificially bright and brassy.

I was pleased to see nearly all of the more famous classical music parodies on the program, including “The Rabbit of Seville” (set largely to bits of Rossini’s overture), “A Corny Concerto” (which sends up Johann Strauss and classical ballet), and of course, “What’s Opera, Doc?”, which uses music from six separate Wagner operas to lampoon the histrionic excesses sometimes associated with those operas. The “Salute to Bugs Bunny, from His Friends at Hanna-Barbera” sequence, however, struck me as something of an irrelevant distraction. Yes, “Tom and Jerry at the Hollywood Bowl” was fun, but the scenes from “Scooby-Doo” and “The Flintstones” (accompanied by brisk live performances of “In the Hall of the Mountain King” and Offenbach’s “Can-Can”, respectively) only served as a reminder of how cheesy Hanna-Barbera’s animation was in comparison to the WB product.

Still, George Daugherty’s Bugs Bunny at the Symphony is, on the whole, a cleverly conceived and smartly executed tribute to the endless inventiveness of animators such as Chuck Jones, Robert McKimson, and Bob Clampett as well as the ingenuity of Carl Stalling and his stalwart assistant and sometime pianist, Milt Franklyn. A splendid time was clearly had by all, and if events like this can open the eyes and ears of the younger set to the job of live music, I’m all for them. After all, my own early exposure to those cartoons eventually led to my learning to play, sing, and love the great works of the past and present. If the tinny sound of a small TV speaker could do that over half a century ago, surely the full might of the St. Louis Symphony can do it today. It gives one optimism, and that’s a quality in short supply these days

Bugs Bunny at the Symphony was the first live performance at Powell Hall of the 2011–2012 season. The first official subscription concert takes place next weekend, September 16 and 17. It’s an all-Stravinsky evening that features the scores for the ballets Petrushka, Les Noces, and The Rite of Spring, accompanied by “a visual narrative”. For more information you may call 314-534-1700, visit slso.org, or follow @slso on Twitter.