S.A. Symphony, music of Led Zeppelin:
Stairway to bloat
March 9, 2008I have a great idea for a musical crossover. We'll get a string quartet to play the Beethoven A-minor, just as it's written, but we'll enhance it with new parts for bagpipe, baritone sax and theramin. Neat, huh?
On second thought, maybe not. Too bad the well-meaning management of the San Antonio Symphony didn't think twice before participating in a nearly comparable act of vandalism -- arranger Brent Havens's symphonic enhancements, so to speak, of iconic Led Zeppelin songs. Havens conducted the amplified orchestra and an excellent rock group Friday night in the Municipal Auditorium.
I don't mean to suggest that the music of Led Zeppelin (or Beethoven, for that matter) requires reverential, hands-off treatment. Indeed, part of the problem with Friday's concert was Havens's professed aim to have the rock group duplicate the cuts from Led Zeppelin albums "verbatim." That aim was most fully realized by singer and 12-string guitarist Randy Jackson, who channeled Robert Plant's vocal mannerisms and trumpet-like falsetto (and his hair) to a fare-thee-well, though Jackson's smoothly polished instrument didn't match Plant's raw edge. Much of the time, Jackson's vocals sounded too planned, but not always. Accompanying himself on 12-string, he made the lovely "Thank You" ("If the sun refused to shine...") fully his own, and an ideal prelude to an equally convincing "Stairway to Heaven." At the other end of the spectrum, Jackson's account of "Black Dog" was satisfyingly feral.
While preserving the general outlines of the original cuts, the band fortunately was not slavish in its fidelity. Some of the departures, however, missed the spirit of the originals. Drummer Powell Randolph's solo in "Moby Dick" and guitarist George Cintron's electrifying solo in "Heartbreaker" were longer and more showy than the original versions, on the album "Led Zeppelin II," by John Bonham and Jimmy Page. Bonham's solo on the recording was actually quite spare, even delicate.
More generally, Led Zeppelin was not the sort of band that threw everything at you. But Havens, in his orchestrations, did. Only occasionally did an orchestral line make a positive contribution -- the oboes in "Ramble On," for example. Most of the time, the extra sonic mass just gummed up the works. Too, the bloated orchestrations exaggerated the conservative character of Led Zeppelin's tunes. At times the model for Havens's "enhancements" seemed to have been Meredith Willson's oversized string-laden arrangements of the early 1950s. It was as though Milton Berle had horned in on Richard Pryor's act.
I think there's huge potential value for symphony orchestras in new music rooted in various rock aesthetics, and perhaps in the insightful recomposition of iconic material. But to be artistically successful, such efforts require a composer of talent equal to that of the original creators -- someone who can use the sounds of the orchestra to grow something fresh in the rock idiom, not just pour goop on the past.
Mike
Greenberg
