Greg Stepanich

Tonys offer orchestrators a moment in the sun

There can't be too many of us, but I'm one of those people who can't help watching the Tony Awards and saying: Let's hear it for the orchestrators.

As I said, there aren't too many of us.

But if you're interested in what the theater season was like over the past year, it's worth paying attention not just to the new music that gets the honors, but to the folks who recreate that music for different instrumental combinations. The work of the orchestrator is not often appreciated by the public at large, but it's a special and important art.

It's not often realized that many of the composers who have written musicals have been in many cases natural tunesmiths — Irving Berlin comes to mind — but their contribution to the sound of a musical vanished after they played the songs for the first time to the backers of the show. After that, the responsibility for the way the show hits that first-night audience, and the audiences thereafter, lies with the professionals who dress up the music in orchestral garb.

Now, good songs can be played on a bad upright and it doesn't matter: It's durable material. The score for Oklahoma!, for example, which I once conducted in a particularly memorable theatre experience, contains one classic American song after another; it doesn'tneed the orchestral instruments to work.

But it's so pleasurable to hear the extra dimension of the strings at the beginning of Oh, What a Beautiful Morning. The orchestrator was Robert Russell Bennett (whose autobiography is rather interesting, if you run across it), and at the hold that comes at the end of "an elephant's eye," the chord's a suspension that gently resolves. On the piano, it's calm and cool; scored for strings in intimate quartet style, it's sleepily langorous, just like the world opening up under the beneficent ministrations of Old Sol.

The orchestrator adds something very much his own to the scores, and the sound pictures we have in our heads owe a lot to these people. Having orchestrated music for an original school musical or two in my younger days, I remember feeling that in some cases I had to try to do something heroic to make the song work — adding countermelodies, choosing unusual instrumental combinations — and in other cases, I just had to figure out how best to stay out of the way.

One of the veteran orchestrators nominated this week for a Tony is Jonathan Tunick, who is almost as responsible for defining the sound of Stephen Sondheim's scores as the composer himself, who after all had magnificent training under no less an eminento than Milton Babbitt. Tunick undoubtedly works closely with Sondheim to craft the sound of the scores, but at some point, it's just him, just his taste and his experience, that leads him to that moment in the second act when he says: Yes, a celesta here, that will make this work.

The Tonys ( here's a list of the nominees; the orchestrators are way down at the end) ceremony is one of the only times the general public is made aware of what these writers do, and it would be instructive for this year's show if we could get five minutes of explanation. Show us how the song sounded for the composer, let's hear him or her play it, then let's hear how the song sounds transmuted through the medium of a whole additional library of sonic color.

It's not by any means an easy job, and it's good that there is at least a brief moment in the spotlight for these important craftspeople, who are without any doubt creators in their own right.