Philadelphia Orchestra enlivens 'Godfather' at Mann

It was an offer you couldn't refuse: a classic film, a great score, a great classical orchestra. There was much to like about the Philadelphia Orchestra's Thursday-night performance at the Mann Center of Nino Rota's score beneath a vivid screen showing The Godfather.

There is also something of a feeling of treading water on these movie nights. In terms of developing audiences for classical music, the trend of pairing live orchestras with film likely will have little to show for it in the end.

Still, it feels like justice to those of us who believe that as much art lies in that quivering line off to the side of the celluloid as in the main frame.

When sound and story inform each other, especially in unexpected ways, it's powerful. You don't immediately understand what that main theme means when played by a lone trumpet at the top of the 1972 film. But significance filters in with the story line. Wistful and twisting, the tune is the musical idée fixe for the Corleone family, a high-wire waltz for a way of life that, for all its brutality, is precarious and disappearing fast.

Rota, known mostly for his work with Fellini and Visconti, comes with some nice local ties. He studied with master orchestrator Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute of Music in the early 1930s, and, much later, attracted an advocate in Riccardo Muti, who had the right idea in reconfiguring (and recording) the music from the first two Godfather films as a suite.

Thursday night, there were long stretches of players sitting silently, many watching the nearly three-hour film like the rest of us. It often seemed like a waste of talent. But when called upon, they dropped emotional explosives with incredible precision and charge. In the scene where Michael Corleone murders two gangland foes in a restaurant, the sound of mayhem reigns. But it's only a meticulously timed beat later that Rota tells us what to make of it with a shattering brass entrance like Puccini at the apocalypse. It's a terrific moment, and it's all Rota's.

It's also fair to say that only a first-rate orchestra - led here by Justin Freer - could have produced impact on this scale. They had help. The small band within a band of traditional Italian instruments - accordionist Joanna Arnold, mandolin player Patrick Mercuri, and guitarist Allan Slutsky - completed an ensemble of such authority as one is unlikely to encounter again, in the concert hall or out.

215-854-5611