When the Barbican last paid tribute to his orchestral music, in 1983, Frank Zappa declared it a disaster. He hated the venue’s acoustics, demanded that the orchestra be rigorously split up to assist the mixing process, criticised conductor Kent Nagano, accused the London Symphony Orchestra’s members of being drunk, and claimed they made hundreds of errors. And that was a performance that received a 20-minute standing ovation, which suggests that the notoriously perfectionist Zappa might have been his own worst critic.
We often view rock stars who dabble in the classical world in the same way we might a dog walking on its hind legs, but Zappa was composing for orchestras long before he made rock albums. As well as containing plenty of sly references to his 20th-century modernist heroes, Zappa’s densely written scores often sound like a dozen different film soundtracks playing concurrently: Carl Stalling’s chaotic cartoon scores set alongside slurring Bollywood violins; Psycho strings mixed with Gershwin-style romanticism; spooky spy-movie woodwind versus thunderous car-chase percussion.
