The name Carl Stalling may not mean a thing to you, but anyone who’s been near a television over the last 80 years has encountered his music.
Stalling (1981-1972) was a composer, arranger and conductor for the Warner Bros. animation studio; just about all the lighthearted or helter-skelter symphonic music you’ve ever heard in a Loony Tunes or Merry Melodies cartoon short came from him.
It’s said that Stalling wrote one all-new orchestration per week for 22 years.
While the majority of Stalling’s work was original and carefully timed to the animation, he often used familiar themes to further amplify the action onscreen. Indeed, many of the most famous Warner shorts, musically, were parodies of classical, opera or Tin Pan Alley scores.
That’s where The Florida Orchestra comes in.
Bugs Bunny at the Symphony is a live orchestral performance timed, to the second, to high resolution screenings of the original cartoons. TFO is in the Mahaffey Theater with the big show at 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday.
The touring show is owned by Warner Bros., so the shorts have been stripped of their pre-recorded music so that the orchestra can play it live-to-film. The dialogue (and the over-the-top singing) remain.
Among the highbrow entertainments on the program are What’s Opera Doc?, The Rabbit of Seville, High Note, Duck Amuck, A Corny Concerto and that all-time favorite One Froggy Evening, in which an unnamed and non-speaking frog sings and dances (with top hat and cane) at inopportune moments.
(This character was, many years later, dubbed Michigan J. Frog; in the 1955 short, neither the frog nor the hapless schmuck who discovers him have names.)
Warners composer/arrangers Milt Franklyn, Carl Johnson and Christopher Lennertz are also represented. Listen out for strains of Wagner, Rossini, von Suppé, J. Strauss II, Smetana, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn, Donizetti, Ponchielli … and Johnny Mercer.
James Fellenbaum conducts. Find tickets at this link.
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