Stellar performance

When you team modern science fiction with classical music's thousand-year-old heritage, that's a force to be reckoned with. This weekend, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra taps into that force with its Star Trek concerts, featuring live performances of the TV show's music, hosted by actors from the series' various incarnations. Like other sci-fi/symphony crossovers, from the touring Video Games Live show to the TSO's own Star Wars Concert three years ago, it's a piece of unabashedly popular programming that seeks to please nerd culture and sophistos alike.

Few sci-fi franchises are as popular or as durable as Star Trek. In the more than 40 years since Kirk and Spock's initial galactic cavorting on the USS Enterprise, worldwide fascination with the program shows no sign of relenting. To date, it has spawned five TV spinoffs and 10 feature films, with an 11th due to be released next spring. On top of that, it has a distinct musical advantage. No other televised space opera has such a recognizable theme, whether it's the version that opened the original show in which the melody is sung by soprano Loulie Jean Norman or one of the many subtle variations that have been woven into the incidental music of Star Trek's ensuing legacy.

"That theme has become iconic," says John de Lancie, who played the omnipotent libertine Q in Star Trek: The Next Generation. De Lancie and fellow Star Trek alumnus Robert Picardo host the TSO concerts, which follow the theme and its variations over the course of the franchise. "It's always being reinforced as it continues to explore new worlds," de Lancie says, "just like the Enterprise."

De Lancie says the concerts bring a new dimension to the music. "I'd say 99.99 per cent of the time [while watching Star Trek] you're hearing the music in a four- by six-inch speaker. But this time you'll hear it with a 100-piece ensemble. No technology comes close to the effect of a live symphony orchestra. The experience is completely enlarged, and the music stands up completely."

Star Trek's original theme was composed by Alexander (Sandy) Courage in 1965. Courage, who died last month at age 88, was a fine soundtrack composer (and superb orchestrator) whose long career was overshadowed by that one culture-denting tune. In fact, Courage only worked on Star Trek's first few episodes; he left after its creator, Gene Roddenberry, wrote some trashy lyrics to the music and claimed half of the royalties.

Despite his falling out with Roddenberry, Courage continued to occasionally work with the longest-running Star Trek composer, Jerry Goldsmith, orchestrating Goldsmith's scores for the films Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Insurrection.

"Courage's theme has had a series of composers working with it for the last 30 years," says Picardo, who played the hologram doctor in the series Star Trek: Voyager. "Jerry Goldsmith's Voyager theme is a brilliant reworking of the original material."

Music permeates every aspect of Star Trek, from Riker's trombone performances on Next Generationto those enticing references to Klingon opera, but Picardo's holograph doctor was probably the most musical personality in the history of the franchise. "Jeri Taylor [a script writer for Voyager] wrote me in as an opera fan, so I ended up singing a half dozen times," Picardo says. "It amused me that a mechanical character would like the most emotional art style possible. She had me singing Oh Suave Fanciulla from Puccini's La Boheme."

The TSO's Star Trek concerts won't be your typical evening at the symphony. "It's going to be a bit campy," de Lancie says. "Think of this as an adult's children's concert where there's a fair amount of dialogue. We provide anecdotes about being on set and the times between when the show went off and back on. And how Goldsmith added to the music over the years. What they did for the first couple of movies, people weren't making music like that."

"You're going to hear all the music from all the shows and all the movies," adds veteran conductor Erich Kunzel, who is overseeing the concerts. The program begins at the very beginning, with the music for The Cage, the show's original 1964 pilot episode starring Jeffrey Hunter as Capt. Pike. (William Shatner's Capt. Kirk wasn't introduced until the second pilot in 1965.)

Kunzel is impressed with Star Trek's soundtracks. "They used great composers, like James Horner, who wrote Star Trek III," he notes. "That horn call in the beginning of Sandy's theme is like a motif, and every composer since the pilot has used it in some way to keep the story being one continual drama."

For those who don't normally attend the symphony but love Star Trek, the live music is as close to being inside the Enterprise as you can get. Listening to it, you can imagine how Roddenberry must have felt more than 40 years ago, when he first heard the rehearsals and decided he had to get in on the revenues this tune was going to generate.

Star Trek: The Music plays Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall on June 20 and 21.

John Keillor is a Toronto writer.