Young love

The Atlantic Chamber Orchestra goes for the heart

By Doug Hubley

A Little Night Music” happens Saturday Feb 10, 7 p.m. cocktails, 8 p.m. music, Mariner’s Church, 368 Fore Street. 846-0137.

LAWRENCE GOLAN: “If we fill the house with Portland Symphony Orchestra patrons, we have failed in our mission.”

Now entering its third season, the Atlantic Chamber Orchestra is Portland’s latest answer to the perennial musical question: where are all the young folk?

And it’s a blunt answer. The ACO was founded specifically to seduce new listeners, people in their 20s and 30s, into classical music. Since the music itself appears to be inadequate to the job (which should make any cultural Darwinist’s ears prick up), the orchestra wields other tools of the seducer’s art — champagne, poetry, sweets, spectacle, and good old physical proximity.

Although anyone is welcome, “if we fill the house with Portland Symphony patrons, we have failed in our mission,” says Lawrence Golan, ACO co-founder, conductor, and artistic director.

A valentine-themed concert Saturday evening is typical ACO fare. “The overriding concept is an evening of musical and culinary aphrodisiacs,” Golan says. Champagne is featured at the cash bar for an hour prior to the music. Chocolate-dipped strawberries are included in the ticket price. The program, he explains, “is beautiful and romantic music with specific evening or nighttime connotations.”

Hence the program’s not stunningly original title, “A Little Night Music.” In German that phrase is “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” and Mozart’s popular confection with that name will be performed. But the romantic clincher consists of a poem and music based on the poem. WGME-TV news anchor Kim Block will read Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”), published by the German poet Richard Dehmel in 1896. Then the ACO will perform Arnold Schoenberg’s interpretation of the Dehmel, a piece that remains one of the composer’s most popular, probably because he wrote it before he went levitating off into the stratosphere of musical abstraction.

The Schoenberg ends the evening, and it’s preceded not only by the Mozart, which is almost pop music, but some genuine pop: “My Heart Will Go On,” heaven help us, the smash hit from Titanic. (A piece by 19th-century English composer Hubert Parry is also scheduled.) A little light music is part of the ACO deal, especially when Golan can link it up to the serious stuff; he has previously featured such Top 40 hits as “A Lover’s Concerto,” the Bach-based 1965 hit for a girl group called the Toys. For sure, the ACO is a progressive classical music outfit, but what’s forward is the presentation, not the music. The Toys aside, the ACO plays nothing that you wouldn’t find in a typical symphony’s repertoire, simply because that’s the repertoire it’s trying to promote.

It’s a repertoire Golan knows from both ends of the baton. Since 1990, he has served as both the Portland Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster and associate professor of music at the University of Southern Maine, where he directs string studies and conducts a variety of ensembles. Though he started as a violinist, conducting is an ever-larger part of his career. Right after Saturday’s show, in fact, he’s off to Uzbekistan to conduct the opera Rigoletto.

If accessible repertoire is a lure for listeners, having accessible musicians is another. On the theory that music’s fascination increases with proximity to the people making it, the ACO always plays intimate venues, even though small seating capacities hurt revenues. Saturday’s concert is at the Mariner’s Church banquet center, seating about 150, which puts audience and musicians practically in each other’s laps.

Similarly, pre-concert receptions give patrons face time with the musicians (Saturday’s starts at 7 p.m.). Usually, if musicians and listeners mix at all, it’s at a reception following the concert, when the players are buoyed by afterglow and listeners are sleepy. Mingling beforehand is a little less comfortable for the musicians, what with pre-concert jitters, frisky young professionals at the cash bar, and Golan’s express orders to schmooze with patrons instead of your friends in the orchestra. Nevertheless, he believes his troops support the concept. “Believe it or not, it makes you more comfortable as a performer when it’s not this sea of eyeballs in the audience, a sea of strangers,” Golan says, “but someone you just had champagne with.”

For purposes of seduction, the Verklärte Nacht is loaded. It has a little star power, thanks to Kim Block; a spiritualized yet slightly sexy romanticism; and a Schoenberg still feeling Richard Wagner’s florid influence as he renders Dehmel’s imagery into sound. The theme is love’s transformative power: During a moonlit walk, a woman confesses to her new lover that in a moment of despair, before they met, she got pregnant in a loveless coupling with another man. Seizing the opportunity to play Mr. Generosity, as any of us would, our hero declares that their love is enough to make the child their own. “You have transfused me with splendor,” he says, in what will undoubtedly be a new addition to the city’s stock of pickup lines.

Taken individually, none of the ACO’s audience-building devices are new. The difference is that Golan is laying them all on at once and for no other reason than to attract those new listeners. In fact, he hopes that the ACO will ultimately serve as an entree to all sorts of happenings too often seen as prohibitively highbrow.

“What we are is a catalyst organization,” he says. “We want people who have never been to fine arts events — never been to an art exhibit, never been to the symphony, never been to a play — to come to an ACO event and say, ‘Hey, this fine arts stuff isn’t so bad. It’s kind of fun.’ ”

Doug Hubley can be reached at doug.hubley@worldnet.att.net.