Orff's primal, exultant Carmina Burana, plus Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, and more.

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Congratulations to you, Mickey! No film that has come out of Hollywood over the past seven decades has had a greater impact on new audiences with classical music than Disney’s Fantasia. It’s surprising that this iconic movie—the third and last that the great Leopold Stokowski made in Hollywood—stirred up such controversy when it was premiered. Back then the classical music world was very conservative and highly resistant to change. That’s not surprising—with change comes the possibility of failure. But reinventing oneself and one’s work also has the potential of winning over fresh, new audiences. With The Big Broadcast of 1938, 100 Men and a Girl (starring a young and high chirping soprano, Diana Durbin), and finally Fantasia, Stokowski had done what no other performing musician had done in history—he became a household name not only to music lovers, but film lovers as well. He did this not only for fame’s sake, but also to bring the sometimes stiff and stodgy world of orchestral music into the 20^th century, just at a time when 78 RPM (that’s revolutions per minute for the under-forty crowd) records were finally going mainstream. With Fantasia, Stokowski and the engineers at Disney brought the proto-psychedelic Toccata and Fugue, Mussorgsky’s nightmarish Night on Bald Mountain, and Schubert’s (and Stokowski’s) 1940s oo-ah chorus in Ave Maria (all on this evening’s program) on screen in technicolor and living stereo. Never before had people heard and seen music quite like this. And it is something to consider that more people have experienced the pieces in this movie than have ever heard them live in a concert hall. Not bad for a film that was considered a flop for its first 20 years! Stokowski became one of my heroes in music, probably because I wanted to become a musician after I first saw Fantasia as a young man. He was a visionary who, like Richard Wagner a century earlier, wanted to use every scrap of modern technology available to make the performances of music as visceral and engaging as possible.

So here we are on this summer night in the year 2009—Carmina will be 72 years old—Fantasia will shortly turn a youthful 70. We are happy to present tonight’s music as a tribute to a great man, a forward thinker in a world afraid of change, who brought the classical music world into the future. From the days of Mr. Edison’s recording cylinders to 78s; film, radio, television, stereo, and long playing records; this was a man who continually ushered classical music into the next media sensation. Stokowski is no longer the household name he was when I was a kid, laughing at Bugs Bunny’s spoof of him in the cartoon Long-Haired Hare, but he is still someone I think of every time I get ready to conduct a concert. What would Stokowski do with YouTube, Facebook, downloadable DVDs, and Netflicks is a question everyone in the music world should be asking. I am certain he would, were he here today, have loved NSO@Wolf Trap’s Video Games Live!, and maybe even this program tonight. That is, if he wasn’t too busy on Twitter tweeting about his upcoming concert broadcast live on Hulu.com.

—Emil de Cou NSO@Wolf Trap Festival Conductor