ELVIS SCHOENBERG'S ORCHESTRE SURREAL: Eclectica!
Rue de la Harpe Records is proud to acquire Allegro Non Troppo Records' complete catalog, which includes Elvis Schoenberg's Orchestre Surréal, and their debut and sophomoric cds, Air Surreal and It's Alive! Their newest, Manic Voodoo Lady - A Tribute to Hendrix, has just released on Rue de la Harpe.
The Orchestre Surréal is a 26-piece hybrid orchestra of daring, top Los Angeles studio musicians that defies categorization. One-of-a-kind and eclectic, the Orchestre Surréal combines rock-n-roll classics with the classical masters, as well as all sorts of world and ethnic music, jazz improvisation, opera, soulful singing and underscored spoken monologues. This melting pot of musical sounds creates an exhilarating theatrical spectacle, stripping away the barriers of cultural, generational, and artistic prejudice, and promoting the message of open-mindedness through art.
"If all art can co-exist and become more enriched in the process, then so can all people."
––– Elvis Schoenberg
For the past ten years the Orchestre Surréal has been performing in nightclubs in the
Los Angeles area: most notably The Knitting Factory, The Cinegrill, the
Laguna Arts Festival, the legendary Whiskey A-Go-Go, and the prestigious
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, to name a few. The Orchestre Surréal has the distinction of being
the largest group ever to perform live on KXLU Radio, and has staged three
fully scripted theatrical productions: Dismembering the Classics,
which performed a sold-out run at the David Henry Hwang Theater of the East
West Players; Symphony of the Absurd, which debuted at the John Anson
Ford Amphitheatre and won the L.A. Music Award in 2003 for "Best Rock Opera,"
and Concerto for the Committed, which was simulcast on PBS.
"Schoenberg and company have made a name for themselves both as superb musicians and as performance artists who bring a robust theatricality and strong visual elements to the stage."
––– Jane Emery, L.A. SPLASH
Elvis Schoenberg, AKA Ross Wright, earned a Masters Of Music from
California State University Los Angeles, a Bachelors from California State
University Northridge, and a diploma from the UCLA Film Scoring Program, Dick Grove
School Of Music, and The Musicians Institute. A classically trained composer
with a diverse musical background, he has worked as a composer, ghostwriter
and orchestrator on over twenty feature films, and his concert music has been
performed throughout the United States and internationally.
Elvis Schoenberg's Orchestre Surréal is a project Mr. Wright put together in
1997. His compositions and arrangements quickly got the attention of the L.A.
music community, and after two only concerts the group was listed in Music
Connection's top 100 unsigned artists, and became L.A. Weekly's "Pick of the
Week." Now the Orchestre Surréal has become a prestigious group that
many top professionals vie to perform with.
Absurd and More at Ford
By Richard S. Ginell, Special to The Times
"By day a mild-mannered musician and film composer, when Ross Wright gets anywhere near a podium, voila!, he becomes Elvis Schoenberg, fearlessly jumping boundaries of genre and taste in a single leap.
"{Not merely content to perform shotgun marriages between the likes of Wagner and Nancy Sinatra, Mussorgsky and Santana, etc., Wright (er, Elvis) took on a more ambitious task Friday night at the Ford Amphitheatre - a "book musical" of a sort called 'Symphony of the Absurd!' It was, as Ed Sullivan would have said, 'a really big shew' in which Wright incorporated many of his set pieces and some newer numbers into a hellzapoppin' revue, with an eclectic assortment of dancers, sexy girls, pulp novel narrations, lighting effects, dry ice. In other words, it was a real hoot.
"The 'storyline' - cooked up by "Dangerous" Dan O'Callaghan, the portly tenor who can also do cartwheels (shades of John Belushi) - was a slender thing, indeed: Elvis and his friends save the Earth from an invasion of space aliens. It was just a ruse to link several of Wright's musical contraptions into a reasonably flowing whole, and perhaps to get in a few political licks - with O'Callaghan deposing the current Chief Executive and running for office himself to the tune of the Bee Gees' 'Jive Talkin'.
"If anything, Wright's collages of this and that bring Frank Zappa to mind - the quick cuts between styles, the intricately difficult lines, the occasional jazz breaks. But Wright doesn't share Zappa's gleeful misanthropy; his lampooning seems more affectionate and respectful of his audience's love of pop culture. At one point, where 'Blue Suede Shoes' is sung against a wacky 12-tone setting, the idiom literally could be called Elvis Schoenberg.
"Much of this mayhem featured the vocals of the pink-platinum-haired chanteuse The Fabulous Miss Thing (Angela Carole Brown), whose delivery sometimes resembled that of Tina Turner and who also plays a mean theremin. The 22-piece Orchestre Surreal deftly handled any number of styles - with some good bebop breaks by the wind soloists - although the strings sounded a bit flummoxed by some of Wright's more contorted lines."
L.A. Times Monday September 22, 2003
The Orchestre Surréal has been heard/seen on:
PBS (Live from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion)
KPFK-FM
KUCI-FM
KXLU
Channel 32 (Live from the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre)
And has performed live at:
Whiskey A-Go-Go
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
The Gig in Hollywood
The Knitting Factory
Hollywood Athletic Club
Cinegrill
Laguna Arts Festival
Henry David Hwang Theatre - East West Players
John Anson Ford Amphitheatre
California Plaza
The Earth Day Festival
The Democratic National Rally
And has been reviewed by:
Jon Pepper, Music Connection Magazine
Richard S. Ginell, Los Angeles Times
L.A. Weekly
Jane Emery, L.A. Splash
Christine Adamo, Long Beach Forty-Niner
TR Black, BlackEye