Abu Dhabi // The Emirates Palace auditorium drew an unusually fresh-faced crowd last night for the latest instalment of the Abu Dhabi Classics concert series, The Magical Music of Walt Disney. A large and vocal audience dominated by small children responded with enthusiasm to themes from such Disney films such as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast, as performed by the London Philharmonia Orchestra.
Parts of the concert were accompanied by animations made by pupils from the Raha International School and the British School, projected on screens behind the stage. The musicians were led by the veteran film-music conductor Allan Wilson, whose recent work can be heard in the film version of Harry Potter and Order of the Phoenix. But it was the evening's compère, Paul Rissman, who was centre of attention. A practised music educator, boyish in a purple shirt and combat trousers, Rissman engaged the audience with repeated appeals for the "boys and girls" to identify various instruments in the orchestra, clap along to one of Aladdin's more rhythmically distinctive tunes, and name Disney films based on leading descriptions of their characters and incidents. The audience played along with gusto.
The show focused on recent Disney fare, to the exclusion of hits from the company's mid-20th century heyday. Opening with the theme from the 2004 Disney-Pixar production The Incredibles, the orchestra moved through a medley of tunes from Beauty and the Beast (1991), accompanied by back-projected stills from the movie. Then Rissman announced: "We're going to go much, much closer to home", and the musicians launched into an exploration of the music of Aladdin (1992), including a lolloping camel-ride theme on double bass and bongos, to which the audience was urged to add punctuating handclaps and thigh-slaps.
Highlights from 1994's The Lion King and 2003's live-action hit Pirates of the Caribbean followed. However the show's centrepiece was a reworked version of Stravinsky's dark and complex The Firebird, annexed to the Walt Disney oeuvre because it featured in Fantasia (1940). Rissman guided his young audience through the thorny 1910 work by telling a playfully updated version of its fairy-tale source - one in which the Firebird persuades the heroic Prince Ivan to release it by promising a gift "better than a Nintendo Wii".
The upbeat narration contrasted with atmospheric drawings by the British and Raha International School pupils, which depicted the Prince, the Firebird, a dark forest and assorted monsters in a moody, sketch book style, coloured pencil lines appearing on a black background. It produced a remarkably professional effect. The audience may have received the original Disney material more warmly, but the Stravinksy still managed to work its spell. It was reprised as an encore and got a standing ovation - though this, admittedly, led by the parents.
elake@thenational.ae
