Long and Winding Road to Poignant End

The news today, oh boy, is that a lucky man who’s made the grade can get away with anything.

In an age when celebrity may be the most valuable currency of all, being a beloved, world-class famous person buys Paul McCartney the license to compose a boring symphonic muddle such as “Standing Stone” and get it performed by respected musicians in high-profile concert halls around the world.

The William Hall Master Chorale performed this “symphonic poem” Saturday with the house lights on at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, giving the audience a chance to peruse McCartney’s flowery narrative in the program.

The music-to-read-by was little more than a glorified score to a formulaic adventure film. The 75-minute “Standing Stone” was so uneventful and musically unfocused, so powerless to create a world of sound and tug a listener into it, that your humble scribe found himself doodling in his notebook for the first time in 13 years as a rock critic.

The Beatles pulled me into rock ‘n’ roll when I was a kid, and the memories and gratitude remain powerful; I never thought McCartney, of all people, would remind me of the dreariest hours of my earlier reporting days, when I would doodle to fill the droning time while covering school boards and city councils.

So why is a rock critic reviewing a classical performance? You can take that up with my editor (come to think of it, maybe I will too), but McCartney’s distorted sense of his abilities, coupled with his celebrity pull, is the fundamental anomaly that begets all others.

Hearing that one of our own has suddenly gone classical, the best we rock fans can hope for is a hybrid that expands upon the musical simplicity of rock while keeping its vigor, exuberance and tightly wound intensity.

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Elvis Costello, McCartney’s sometime songwriting partner, got it right when he collaborated as an equal partner with the Brodsky Quartet on “The Juliet Letters,” a pop-classical hybrid from 1993 in which Costello continued to do what he does best--sing and write compact songs of no more than five minutes--while stretching with new instrumentation and a new, beautifully executed writing approach in which each lyric took the form of an emotionally powerful letter.

“Standing Stone” has no unifying form at all. Its story is a grossly inflated (and no doubt unintended) gloss on the Beatles’ animated film, “Yellow Submarine.” Epic hero arrives in magical vessel in nick of time to save peaceful, pastoral, music-loving folk from invading meanies. Except that McCartney begins at the beginning--the beginning of time, that is, which wastes plenty of a listener’s time on cliched evocations of the elements and musical pomp fit for a royal pageantry sequence from a medieval costume drama.

When he finally gets his hero to Pepperland, or wherever it’s supposed to be, after a dissonant, honking-and-crashing lost-at-sea sequence that’s about as appealing as being idled in a sea of blaring car horns, the music gives no special character to the bad guys or the innocent folk, or for that matter, to the hero and his newfound lover.

The Master Chorale’s multitude of voices was mainly engaged in wordless wind swirls puffed with lofty wonderment (think E.T. and Elliot taking their airborne bike ride); among the spicier bits was a Celtic-tinged victory dance that gave the piece some momentary propulsion (think Ewoks feasting after knocking off the Empire).

The concluding love theme did have a suitably passionate swell and a fairy-tale note of grandeur and purity. Of course, it called to mind the recent sad loss of McCartney’s wife, Linda, to whom the concert was dedicated.

As a rocker, McCartney is a marvelously prepared musician who spent his youth absorbing rockabilly, Chuck Berry, Everly Brothers harmony and the fiery R&B; of Little Richard, then, in the Beatles’ Hamburg days, paid dues to the point of exhaustion in some of the toughest dives in the world.

If he’s as all-fired obsessed about becoming a classical composer as he was about becoming a rocker, he should put in equivalent dues. Otherwise, he should settle for something closer to his area of expertise, perhaps expanding upon the merger of rock with symphonic elements that the Beatles helped pioneer. Please, Paul, no more golden slumbers like “Standing Stone.”