THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, October 22, 1994 TAG: 9410220047
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: By MARK MOBLEY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 146 lines
WHEN THE FILM ``The Phantom of the Opera'' screens at Chrysler Hall tonight, the soundtrack won't be hi-fi. It won't be THX or Dolby or Sensurround.
It'll be live.
The Virginia Symphony is in the pit for the classic silent film, starring Lon Chaney Sr. as the disfigured composer who stalks a Paris Opera soprano. The movie features scenes of opera, ballet and party dancing, not to mention a subterranean organ recital by the Phantom.
Supplying music for all these occasions is Donald Hunsberger, director of the famed Eastman Wind Ensemble at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y.
``Phantom'' dates from 1925, two years before Eddie Cantor first spoke on screen. Today, music is applied to film with the help of sophisticated computer programs, allowing composers to synch their scores frame by frame. But in the silent era, conducting for a film was much like leading an opera - the conductor stood in the pit and watched the action.
Films were distributed with a cue sheet indicating mood changes and plot twists. At each theater, a musician - ranging from the conductor of a large orchestra down to a solo pianist - would select pieces appropriate to the moment.
``Unfortunately, it's a totally lost art and a totally lost period of our history,'' Hunsberger said from his home in Rochester, N.Y. ``What I'm trying to do is save as much of that music as I can.''
Hunsberger, 62, was enlisted in 1980 to prepare a score for ``Peter Pan,'' a 1924 film held by the International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House in Rochester. Today, he leads the Eastman-Dryden Orchestra, which has accompanied such films as ``The Mark of Zorro'' and another Chaney classic, ``The Hunchback of Notre Dame.''
His first guest engagement was with the Syracuse Symphony in 1990, and to date he has performed with 27 different orchestras across the country. ``People come in who've never heard their local symphony play,'' Hunsberger said. Tonight's performance is sold out; tickets remain for the Sunday show in Virginia Beach.
In preparing a silent film score, Hunsberger has at his disposal the Eastman School's 15,000-item collection of theater music. The library incorporated the music holdings of the Eastman Theater, which maintained a 65-piece orchestra that became today's Rochester Symphony. Hunsberger has also collected libraries from theaters in Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio.
``It was a very unique system, when you consider the whole period was only about 1915-16 to '29, and that's it,'' Hunsberger said. The Eastman Theater library stamped every piece of music with the date it was used. Some scores will have 10 or 12 stamps, plus written instructions such as, ``Betty enters from left.''
``I go into the library and pick out music that will fit with each of the emotions, the actions,'' Hunsberger said. ``In `The Mark of Zorro,' the 1920 Douglas Fairbanks film set in Southern California, they are Spanish landowners. The whole thing has a Spanish flavor. For something like that, you go out and find Spanish music that's going to work.''
The medieval ``Hunchback of Notre Dame'' presented a different challenge. ``Either you're going to play plainsong and chant though the whole thing or you pick music that's going to reflect the emotions going on,'' he said.
For ``Phantom,'' Hunsberger has chosen nothing written after 1925, the year of the film's release. Because much of the action takes place during performances of Gounod's ``Faust,'' he selected numbers from that opera. A lot of the score is typical period stuff: generic music written expressly for silent-movie use and parlor piano pieces.
``If I gave you a list of all the material we play, you probably wouldn't recognize 99 percent of it,'' Hunsberger said. But while it may not be familiar, it works a familiar magic.
``With the music and what you select, you can lead the emotions of the viewer,'' Hunsberger said. ''Once, after `Phantom,' a critic called up and he said: `I gotta ask you a question. Why do you cast the Phantom as a sort of vulnerable human, a tragic figure, rather than as a killer - which he is - type of character?' My personal feeling is, this guy's crying out. He may go out and hang somebody, but underneath it all he has the same human emotions everyone else does.''
One trail of musical research didn't pan out. In the film, the Phantom lures the soprano, Christine, to his plush, though windowless, apartment deep beneath the opera house. He serenades her on the organ, and a tight closeup shows the music to be a piece called ``Don Juan Triumphant.'' Hunsberger says one enterprising ``Phantom'' fan isolated a frame of the film and sent him the music, which proved to be gibberish.
But while the audience won't hear the piece on the screen, they will hear organist Russell Schmidt. Hunsberger says the two of them have worked out synthesizer software ``that'll make you think he's playing in your living room.''
Performing the score is as challenging as assembling it, in part because existing prints of silent films often lack continuity.
``I worked on `Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,' a John Barrymore film from 1920, a gorgeous print, and every scene fades out,'' Hunsberger said. ``From an accompanying standpoint, that gives you so much flexibility. In `Phantom' and `Zorro,' you get to the point where the remaining film has been so chopped up or cut or burned, scenes are just butted against each other.''
When guest-conducting an orchestra such as the Virginia Symphony, Hunsberger pulls the show together in just two rehearsals. ``The orchestras are not used to playing 48 tunes in a row,'' he said, adding that players with freelance and pop, and jazz experience fare best.
Hunsberger got his own start as a trombone player in Souderton, Pa., between Allentown and Philadelphia. It's a part of the country where band music was and is popular. ``I'd run out and mow yards in the morning and play solos at night,'' he said.
He studied at Eastman and joined the faculty full-time in 1962. He became music director of the wind ensemble in 1965, after its legendary series of recordings for the Mercury label.
Hunsberger himself has made five CDs with Eastman-Dryden Orchestra on Arabesque, three of which feature the music of Victor Herbert. His recordings with the wind ensemble include the 1987 ``Carnaval,'' featuring trumpeter Wynton Marsalis as soloist, which was nominated for a Grammy.
Hunsberger and the ensemble recently completed their third Japanese tour, during which they were treated like rock stars.
``There's still the non-demonstrative rule in their society, so that before a concert you don't hear the hubbub you hear here,'' he said. ``You can play the greatest piece to open your concert and there'll be polite applause. You'll think, `Did I bomb?' By the time you're done with it, they're wild.'' The ensemble has been mobbed in the parking lot and forced to sign autographs. ``I even signed a guy's wallet this last tour.''
But one of Hunsberger's most memorable tour experiences was with ``Phantom'' in Washington. He performed three shows with the National Symphony while the Andrew Lloyd Webber show was going on next door at the Opera House. He saw the musical and enjoyed it but was surprised by the cast's reaction to the film.
``I sent over an invitation to the cast of the Andrew Lloyd Webber show,'' Hunsberger said. ``A whole bunch of them came over to dress rehearsal. They said, and this is a quote, `It's unbelievable how much he ripped off of the original film, how many words, sentences he took out of the original film.' '' ILLUSTRATION: FILM FACTS
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Illustratiion
by CNB