George Daugherty remembers sitting on the shag carpet circa 1960s, planted in front of the family TV to watch the Saturday morning cartoons.
Eventually it dawned on him: the soundtrack to Bugs, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Tweety and the gang was the same music he was learning in his piano and cello lessons.
“The fact that it was all based on classical music was not something that occurred to me for awhile,” Daugherty said. “Once I figured that out, that really fascinated me. This music is so very special and so iconic and distinctive and it’s instantly recognizable and different from all other cartoon music. There’s nothing really like it, and that really appealed to me from the very beginning.”
A decade or more into his conducting career, Daugherty turned those childhood memories into a new artform of sorts, creating one of the first cine-concert productions that combined film with a live orchestra performance.
Daugherty brings his “Bugs Bunny at the Symphony II” to the Tucson Symphony Orchestra this weekend for two matinee performances — at 4 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 25, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 26. He will conduct the orchestra as clips from Warner Bros. iconic cartoons play on a big screen.
This is the second time the TSO will perform Daugherty’s cine-concert. The orchestra performed his earlier version in 2009 and has since programmed similar cine-concerts including “A New World in Pictures,” based on Dvorák’s “From the New World” Symphony on Dec. 1 and 3. Guest conductor Mei-Ann Chen, who led the orchestra in last season’s “The Planets on the Big Screen,” will lead the orchestra while visuals representing Dvorák’s vision play on a screen.
Daugherty and his team were among the innovators of the cine-concerts with “Bugs Bunny on Broadway” in 1990. The idea came when he and some friends popped in a video of Warner Bros. cartoons and relived their childhoods over pizza and beer.
“I was reminded how brilliant they are and how brilliant the music of Carl Stalling and Mel Blanc, and the Warner Bros. Orchestra is,” Daugherty, 62, said during a phone call last week. “Warner Bros. used the full strength of all 80 or 90 or 100 orchestra members, the same musicians who were in ‘Casa Blanca,’ ‘The Maltese Falcon’ and all these amazing epic movies played for these cartoons.”
“Bugs Bunny on Broadway” toured to orchestras and concert halls around the country for 20 years before Daugherty revised it as “Bugs Bunny at the Symphony.” The show in Tucson this weekend is the second incarnation of that concept, which debuted in 2013 and includes more Warner Bros. characters and tunes, he said.
Among the characters you’ll see: “What’s Opera Doc,” based on Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” opera; the “Rabbit of Seville,” based on Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville”; “Long-Haired Hare,” imaged after English conductor Leopold Stokowski; and “Rhapsody Rabbit,” the concert pianist.
This weekend’s concerts come after Daugherty and his crew of six spend the holiday with family friends in Tucson. He said he will also be reunited with childhood friend TSO cellist Mary Beth Tyndall; the pair were in the orchestra together in high school, he said.
