The Battle Creek Symphony Orchestra opens its season Saturday, Oct 3 at 7:30 p.m. at W.K. Kellogg Auditorium with "Fantasia Come Alive," in a concert that pays tribute to the music Walt Disney chose for the animated films Fantasia (1940) and Fantasia 2000. Music director Anne Harrigan tells Cara Lieurance that these were great pieces long before Disney made them famous, adding that Disney hoped to release a new edition every year. World War II upended those plans. "He was very passionate about the concept of Disney promoting classical music."
The program opens with Johann Sebastian Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor. In the film, the piece appears in Leopold Stokowski's orchestral transcription, played by the Philadelphia Orchestra. This concert instead uses Bach's original organ version, performed on the auditorium's Aeolian-Skinner organ. W.K. Kellogg commissioned the instrument, and its more than 4,000 pipes sit in the walls and ceiling of the hall.
The organ had fallen into disrepair, and there was no budget to fix it. Harrigan credits Trevor Dodd and Brooks Grantier with restoring it on their own. She notes that Disney created a new surround-sound system for the original Fantasia, and the hall does the same thing naturally: "The pipes are in the walls so it is truly a surround sound."
For Amilcare Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours, the symphony asked local art teachers to play the music for their students and send in the drawings for projection. Harrigan hoped for about a hundred. "Well, we received 800 submissions, which is great!" she says. They'll be projected during Dance of the Hours and selections from The Nutcracker.
The symphony is also holding its first open dress rehearsal, at noon on Saturday. It's a pilot program funded by the Binda Foundation. Harrigan modeled it on the rehearsals she opened to the public in Billings, Montana, which drew families, immune-compromised listeners and others. Adult tickets are $10, and those 18 and under attend free. The student artwork will be shown at the rehearsal too, although the orchestra may stop and start as it works.
Tickets and season packages are available at battlecreeksymphony.org or by calling 269-963-1911.
The interview was summarized by Claude AI and edited by the author.
