High Quality--at Very High Decibels

The secret to music appreciation--and to the fabled powers Mozart and all the rest of the great composers have to make you smarter--is a very simple one. Pay attention! So leave it to the clever folks at Disney to confront the most vexing problem of presenting classical music in the musically hostile environment of the modern movie theater, where restive audiences yak, noisily crunch popcorn, slurp soft drinks and share the whole experience with friends but a cell phone call away.

The solution is the Imax Experience. “Fantasia/2000” is loud, very loud. It is big, very big. It grabs you; it holds you; it won’t let go. It forces you to pay attention and drowns out all distractions.

But, of course, it also throws the classical-music baby out with the bathwater. And more: It deafens, tortures, beats that particular baby to a pulp while it is at it. It is, in every sense of the word, a monstrous film. Worse, far worse, “Fantasia/2000” is a clueless film.

The reams of advance publicity that have accompanied “Fantasia/2000” tell of a studio’s genuine desire to rekindle that spark of creativity it felt the beloved original “Fantasia” represented 60 years ago, as well as to find up-to-date ways to direct young ears in the direction of classical music. No one can argue with that.

And impressive is Disney’s apparent penchant for quality. As the original “Fantasia” did with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, the new “Fantasia” strives for, and achieves, high musical quality, this time with James Levine, who conducts the Chicago Symphony and the Philharmonia Orchestra on the soundtrack. Impressive, too, is the fact that, in its choice of soloists, Disney went not necessarily for the big names but for the best. Few may know Ralph Grierson, a local pianist who crosses over between jazz and classical music and makes his career in the studios, but I can’t think of a soloist I would rather hear play “Rhapsody in Blue.” His performance is cool, clean, stylish, rhythmically astute. Yefim Bronfman, who has just recorded the Shostakovich piano concertos with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is the dazzling soloist for the first movement of Shostakovich’s second concerto.

The selection of pieces, however, lacks imagination. The original “Fantasia” included what had been revolutionary music in its time, such as Stravinsky’s ballet score, “The Rite of Spring” (which was less than 30 years old when animated by Disney), and Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain.” “Fantasia/2000” is less bold. The most recent piece, the Shostakovich, written in 1957, is reactionary music. And it is hard to generate much interest over a splashy orchestral potboiler such as Respighi’s “Pines of Rome.” A three-minute excerpt from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony will not likely prove a revelation. Indeed, much of this music is so famous (I seem to hear “Rhapsody in Blue” every time I get on an airplane) that it hardly will come as a revelation to new listeners. When “Fantasia” was made, a decade before the era of the long-playing record, there was nothing like the glut of recorded music we endure today.

Still, one could live with this current batch of selections, especially given the outstanding performances, if they sounded remotely like music once subjected to the Imax Experience. It is here that “Fantasia/2000” works its mischief. One of the most endearing moments in the original “Fantasia” was the personification of the “soundtrack.” A shy, straight line is enticed out of the wings and comes to life graphically representing the instruments of the orchestra in all their color and expressivity. What is particularly moving about this little diversion is the way it shows how much effort is required to capture in sight what the ear so readily absorbs. Without a science lesson, it becomes intuitively clear that the ear can register impulses far more minimal than the eye can see. That classical music has the expressive power that it does is precisely because it makes use of the ear’s extraordinary ability to discern very small stimuli.

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The “Fantasia/2000” soundtrack, Imax style, does not know this. It thinks it must have all the explosive power of an action film. Highs have a shrill, scalding intensity. The bass drum has enough sonic clout to shake the seats. Instruments of the orchestra have been distorted so that they lose much of their natural richness of timbre. Kathleen Battle, whose unmistakably distinctive high soprano soars over the end of the “Pomp and Circumstance” marches, could here be mistaken for an electronic Theremin. Dynamic range is limited to a few gradations of loud. Add this to an overwhelmingly large screen, and, even if the animation had been more inventive, this film would still, I think, prove a tyrannical imposition upon the senses.

It so happened that the day after I endured an Imax screening of “Fantasia/2000,” I attended a live performance of the film in Carnegie Hall, with Levine conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. Seated in the top balcony, where the sound is glorious and where the film was distant, the balance between music and movie was very different. Levine did not do a very good job of synchronizing scores with screen. Music and image existed each in its own right, and an audience had the choice of accepting them together or not. In my case, I found that without sound and picture fitting hand-in-glove, I was more open to a new experience. Even something as insipid as whales romping to Respighi’s mystical evocations of ancient Rome provided mild pleasure.

But the handful of “Fantasia/2000” live performances in New York, London, Tokyo and Pasadena (that one, on New Year’s Eve, carried a price tag of $2,000) were elitist events. For everyone else, “Fantasia/2000” will be exclusively Imax entertainment, and certainly should not be mistaken for anything more.