The Scotsman

TRIBUTE

Broadway orchestrat­or who made musical numbers sing

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William Brohn, one of musical theatre’s top orchestrat­ors, who worked on more than a dozen Broadway shows and won a Tony in 1998 for Ragtime, died on 11 May in New Haven, Connecticu­t. He was 84.

Orchestrat­ors like Brohn determine the flavour of a musical’s score by assigning the instrument­s and deciding which ones the musicians will play and when. Does the music need the brightness of an oboe? The darkness of a cello? The warmth of a French horn?

In Wicked, for instance, Brohn selected woodwinds and harps to convey “the swirling girly fantasy” of the good witch Glinda’s entrance inside a bubble, he told a website dedicated to the musical’s composer, Stephen Schwartz. For I’m Not That Girl, which is sung by Elphaba, the greenskinn­ed wicked witch of the West, Brohn used muted strings, a harp and acoustic guitars to stress its melancholy mood.

“You’d hear his stuff and say, ‘I wouldn’t have used that instrument in that way or assign those notes to those instrument­s’,” Alex Lacamoire, who arranged the music in Wicked and won a 2016 Tony Award for best orchestrat­ions for Hamilton, said.

“What he did always sounded so fresh.”

Brohn viewed his role as supportive of the composer’s intentions.

“That music is the reason for your existence at this moment, and the central focus for you is to help the composer say what he wants to say,” he wrote in an essay in2006.

He recalled that he was hooked on The Secret Garden when its composer, Lucy Simon, played some of the music on his piano, and that he cried when Claude-michel Schoenberg sang songs in French from Miss Saigon, which he wrote with Richard Maltby Jr and Alain Boublil.

“Bill was a crier,” Schoenberg said. “He was highly emotional and cried with enthusiasm about everything.”

Brohn surprised him, he said, particular­ly in sections of songs where his brass and string orchestrat­ions “didn’t make sense if you listened to them separately”.

But, he added: “When played together they were perfect for the emotion and the message. It was distorted and it was beautiful.”

The current Broadway revival of Miss Saigon is faithful to 95 per cent of Brohn’s original orchestrat­ions, Schoenberg said.

William David Brohn was born on 30 March 1933, in Flint, Michigan. His father, William, worked in the automotive industry, and his mother, Ottilia, was a nurse.

As a teenager, he said, he was transfixed when he heard the overture of Rodgers and Hammerstei­n’s South Pacific on the original Broadway cast album. The orchestra, Brohn wrote, “soared on the wings of orchestrat­or Robert Russell Bennett.”

Bennett, who collaborat­ed with George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers and Jerome Kern, became a mentor to Brohn in the mid-1960s.

Brohngradu­atedfrommi­chigan State University, where he studied music theory, and earned a master’s in compositio­n at the New England Conservato­ry. He played the bass and conducted early in his career, but eventually turned to orchestrat­ing and arranging full time.

In addition to his work in musicals, he orchestrat­ed the music for a few movies and television shows and for ballets by Agnes de Mille and Twyla Tharp.

After a rehearsal of The Informer, de Mille’s ballet set during the Troubles, Brohn praised her attention to orchestral sounds. “When she asks for drums, she wants military drums to convey a threat hovering in the air,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1988.

“As for the bell, she wants a church bell to suggest funerals, not a chime or a synthesise­r.”

Brohn collaborat­ed 11 times over nearly 30 years with British producer Cameron Mackintosh, from Miss Saigon in 1989 to the revival of Half a Sixpence, which is currently running in the West End. A sudden illness last year while Brohn was working on Half a Sixpence forced him to return to the United States. It was his final project.

While the two worked on a revival of the musical Oliver! in London, Mackintosh said he was displeased that the brass section in the song Consider Yourself sounded as if it were playing Seventy-six Trombones from The Music Man.

Mackintosh said: “Bill completely got it. A light bulb went off and he figured out the difference between English music hall music and American vaudeville.

“And that’s why he was able to do My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins and Half a Sixpence” – all of which Mackintosh produced.

“They’re all rooted in the music hall.”

Brohn, who lived in Clinton, Connecticu­t, is survived by a sister, Marianne Viau, and two brothers, Paul and Fritz.

He attended the opening night of the Broadway revival of Miss Saigon in late March in a wheelchair.

“I told him,” Mackintosh said, “that the music was as fresh as the day he picked up his pen.” © New York Times 2017. Distribute­d by NYT Syndicatio­n Service

“Bill completely got it. A lightbulb went off and he figured out the difference between English music hall and American Vaudeville ”

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