“The Fantasia orchestra” has accumulated many accolades since Disney featured it in 1940, but there’s been nothing quite like the cultural impact made by the Philadelphia Orchestra when it danced with Mickey Mouse. That makes it especially meaningful that Philly is this month performing Philharmonia Fantastique, an animated film celebrating the orchestra very much inspired by Fantasia.
The Disney film combines brilliant animation – sometimes veering into mesmerizing abstraction – with orchestral fireworks from Stravinsky, Bach, and many others. While it’s a mix-tape rather than a through-composed piece, Fantasia ingeniously combines the imaginative storytelling possibilities of animation with the infinite sound world of the orchestra.
Fantasia very much inspired Philharmonia Fantastique, a new guide to the orchestra featuring a magical Sprite that flies inside instruments. I’ve heard many performances of the piece in the two years since its premiere, and having the film released on Apple TV was particularly exciting because of Apple’s Disney-like embrace of creative technology. But up to this moment, the piece hasn’t been performed by “The Fantastia Orchestra.”
That changes this summer at Saratoga Performing Arts Center, a lovely festival in upstate New York showcasing the Philadelphia Orchestra and its many superstar friends (the evenings before my concert feature Gil Shaham and Yo-Yo Ma).
It’s also poignant for me because it’s being conducted by Edwin Outwater, who recorded the soundtrack with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the height of the pandemic. That week in February 2021, Edwin and the CSO and I brave a heavy blizzard and, admittedly, some rusty skills after a year of lockdown. We all have that week seared in our memories as the first real music-making we did during Covid.
I love the Philadelphia Orchestra for its incredible mix of new and old. The orchestra has elements of the Old World sound that Stokowski made famous in Fantasia, but it also has a new energy and crispness thanks to music director Yannick Nezet-Seguin. The musicians combine impeccable chops with a can-do attitude and warmth.
Everywhere Philharmonia Fantastique is performed is a kind of festival, with a huge mix of symphony patrons and kids enthusiastically watching the Sprite journey inside the orchestra. Hearing Philly play the piece has a special resonance – and I’m deeply grateful to the orchestra and Edwin.