Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 139

ADULTS A C28 CHILDREN'S DAY At The World Trade presented in association with and The Port Authority of NY NJ SATURDAY, MAY 3 AUSTIN J. TOBIN PLAZA 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Join us for the fifth annual celebration of children around the world with FREE performances. (Rain date May 4) CENTERSTAGE ON THE PLAZA Bob McGrath from Sesame Street) WCBS-FM 101.1 Sing-Along Elmo, Lamb Chop, Arthur and more Fujisankei presents Explore! with Fun from Lincoln Center's "Reel To Real Liberty Science Center For Kids" Toymax presents the Laser Music from "The Wizard of Oz" at Experience The Theater at Madison Square Garden Storytelling with Borders Books Bananas in Pajamas" and Music CELEBRITY CENTER DO IT ALL! Kids can meet and greet their Top of the World invites children favorite stars.

(ages 1-12) to visit free Meet the world famous Looney Tunes costume characters Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, courtesy of the Warner Bros. Studio Store on the Mall. Austrian All performances subject to change or cancellation without notice. 24MYH06200 WORLD TRADE CENTER THE PORT AUTHORITY OF NY 8 040 26 a- -wnet COMMUNICATIONS HE Marnott EATING ALONE IS NO Is DAD LONELY? TAKING THEIR MEDICATIONS? SAFE AND SECURE? ACTIVE? If these questions are most important to you, there is an answer. SENIORCARE offering truly affordable luxury at half the price of nursing homes.

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It all sounds pregnant, ominous and vaguely Wagnerian. Welcome to the world of "Symphonic Rock: The British Invasion," in which classic THE tunes Century commentator to have been further classicized through the efforts of Andrew Pryce Jackman (a symphonic rocker's name if ever there was one) and a bevy of bowdlerizers. Arranging "Stairway to Heaven" for the London Symphony Orchestra may sound suspiciously like Muzak, but it isn't: Rather than slather the original tunes with a thick coat of all-purpose blandness, these arrangers avail themselves of a palette rich in orchestrational The Rolling Stones' "Ruby Tuesday" opens with a glittering fanfare worthy of the chariot-race scene in "Ben Hur." Eric Clapton's "Layla" is given an Iberian cast and twisted into a fandango. A version of The Who's "Pinball Wizard" (aided and abetted for mysterious reasons by "Symphonic Rock: The British Invasion" (Claude Hopper Pete Townshend himself on vocals) begins, incongruously, with the sort of plangent string chords that Puccini used to open the final, misery-filled act of one of his lyric tragedies. Is that what people mean when they call "Tommy" a rock opera? The most stylistically consistent track on this orgy of appropriation is The Kinks' "You Really Got which fits nicely into the rigid frame of Ravel's "Bolero." The tune trundles numbly around and around, the snare drum taps out its incessant, processional rhythm, more and more instruments pile onto the wagon each time it goes by, and the music gets thicker and thicker and louder and louder.

Just when it seems as though the piece must boil over or burst, in comes the Royal Choral Society, no less, for that final touch of tumescent spirituality that only a massed chorus can provide. Ostensibly, "Symphonic Rock" is a coy transgression of the boundaries that divide the highminded from the commercial, but actually it is in a fine old tradition of both musical slumming and upward mobility. In the Renaissance, masses often were based on popular melodies and battle tunes, leading one 16th- A complain that "when such compositions are heard in church, they impel everyone to laughter, to the extent that it almost seems as if the temple of God had become a place for the recitation of lascivious and ridiculous things." Beethoven, like many 19thCentury composers, put his name to folk-song settings to bring a touch of peasant authenticity to the middle-class parlor. Traveling in the other direction, "ragging the classics" was a favorite ragtime pianist's ploy in the early part of this century. A syncopated version of the "Miserere" from Verdi's "Il Trovatore" was a particularly popular number.

None of the tracks on this album really attempt to "symphonize" a pop song use the melody as the basis for an original composition which might be a worthwhile thing to try. Instead, familiar tunes are dumped into equally hackneyed contexts and then dutifully spun out to a respectable length. Their charm wears thin after a minute or two. Obviously, to complain that "Symphonic Rock" vulgarizes some fine pop songs by dressing them up in the musical equivalent of a baby-blue tuxedo would be to mistake a camp frolic for a serious effort at crossover. But even if this whole confection is an expensive joke, then the people who get it are also its butt those who listen to what Wendy Wasserstein, in her new play, "An American Daughter," calls "the-'Oh-my-God-I-can'tbelieve-I'm-middle-aged-and-the- culture's-not-about-me-anymore' radio station." "Symphonic Rock" is a novelty item, yes, but it is also a rueful reflection on the fact that rebellious songs written 20 years ago might just as well be staid symphonies composed 200 years ago for all their relevance to the cutting edge.

Haven't people been saying for years that the symphony orchestra is a museum institution? Fine, then in the 1990s that's where "Stairway to Heaven" belongs..