Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.
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HOTTEST TICKET A MASTERPIECE REMASTERED Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z team up for Saturday Night Live. continued from page 56 [Major League Baseball] thought we were crazy to stage a concert during the baseball season." But to have Springsteen "play in the middle of the baseball season in historic Fenway Park was too cool an opportunity to pass up," he says. A host of annual concerts followed in what's now become a rollicking rite of summer. There have been on-field reunions by The Rolling Stones, The Police, New Kids On The Block, and the Backstreet Boys, not to mention shows by fan favorite Neil Diamond, Boston boys Aerosmith, and instant sellout Paul McCartney. Now, with Timberlake, the ballpark gets a throwback. The 20/20 Experience, Timberlake's first album since FutureSex/LoveSounds seven years ago, puts the spotlight on Timberlake as a showman. With his last album, released when he was in his mid-20s, Timberlake was one to watch— the boy-band member made good—but he still edged perilously close to going the reality-show-judge route. Now we know he'd never dip his toes (or the sterling JT brand) into those tepid waters. Instead he's evolved into an ambassador of style and a gifted comedian who catapults any Saturday Night Live episode into the pantheon of television greatness. And he doesn't make music—he crafts it. The long-awaited single "Suit & Tie" is a five-minute-plus orchestration for the post-pop age. And radio stations, often mired in the three-minute convention, didn't even blink before putting it into rotation.. When Timberlake plays Fenway Park in August, Boston will behold the entertainer whose legend is already bespoke. His "Suit & Tie" is cut from essentially the same cloth as Fenway's other musical icons—the ones whose auras have grown only more vaunted with the passage of time, from Sousa to Ellington to Springsteen. The Legends of the Summer Stadium Tour comes to Fenway Park on August 10 and 11, at 7 PM. Tickets are $64.50–$255. 4 Yawkey Way; ticketmaster.com. Jared Bowen is WGBH's Emmy Award-winning reporter and host of the weekly television series Open Studio with Jared Bowen. BC There is a symphony of reasons why the film West Side Story resonates as much today as when it premiered more than 50 years ago—from its representation of an elusive American dream to stark lessons of intolerance. And then there's Leonard Bernstein's monumental orchestral score. On July 13, the Boston Symphony Orchestra brings it to life at Tanglewood—performing the music to a newly remastered, high-definition version of the film. For the BSO to perform a live soundtrack, the music had to be stripped from the film—a near-impossible task because all of the original audio elements of West Side Story, including orchestrations, dialogue, and sound effects, were mixed together when the film was released in 1961. To undo that, the Paris- and LA-based company Audionamix developed an algorithmic process whereby the music could be painstakingly removed from the film without disrupting any other sound. Equally difficult was the adaptation of Bernstein's original score, which was composed for a one-time studio recording, not live performance. For example, his prologue required five pianos and five xylophones. "It's part of the richness and depth of the soundtrack, but it obviously won't work on a concert stage," says Eleonor Sandresky, the project's associate producer. In what Garth Edwin Sunderland, the senior music editor for The Leonard Bernstein Office, described as "a mix of creativity and perspiration," his team managed to create a score made manageable for orchestras like the BSO. The chief challenge was "recreating a sense of intimacy, which film does so well but is difficult in a concert setting," he says. The concert premiered at the Hollywood Bowl in 2011, and hearing it live and outdoors "elevates it to a higher level," Sandresky says—so high that it's yet to be done for any other film, anywhere. West Side Story plays July 13 at the Koussevitzky Music Shed, Tanglewood Music Festival, Lenox, Seiji Ozawa Hall 888-266-1200; bso.org at Tanglewood. PHOTOGRAPHY BY DANA EDELSON/NBC/NBCU PHOTO BANK VIA GETTY IMAGES (TIMBERLAKE, JAY-Z); STEVE ROSENTHAL (SEIJI OZAWA HALL) THE BSO BRINGS WEST SIDE STORY TO LIFE AT TANGLEWOOD. BY JARED BOWEN The 20/20 Experience puts the spotlight on Justin Timberlake as a showman. 58 BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM 056-058_BC_SC_HottestTicket_SUM13.indd 58 6/7/13 1:39 PM