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Brennan decided there was an untapped market for people who wanted to experience nostalgia in a different way. (SUPPLIED PHOTO)

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The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra will show off its dark side this weekend.

Winnipeg's biggest band will team up with London, Ont.-based group Jeans SSRqn Classics for three performances of one of the most popular albums of all time, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. The concert celebrating the milestone release by the British progressive rockers gives a literal meaning to the term, symphonic rock.

"It is a proper rock SSRqn' roll treatment," says Peter Brennan, Jeans SSRqn Classic founder. "It's not elevator-music homogenized Pink Floyd, it's the real thing."

Brennan scored the music for the show, one of almost 50 in the company's catalogue, which includes full concerts of the songs of Queen, Elton John, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and Led Zeppelin.

Brennan studied music in university, but mainly considers himself a guitarist. He was working as a studio engineer in the early 1990s when he was commissioned to come up with a score of some Elton John music for a one-off show with Orchestra London Canada.

The evening was so successful the 58-year-old decided there was an untapped market for people who wanted to experience nostalgia in a different way.

"With the advent of grunge and rap in the early 1990s, it was like something was missing," he says. "To quote my daughter, I was a dinosaur. Why would anyone want to hear pretty vocal sections or horns in the studio? No one wanted me for that stuff, then into the fray it was, 'Let's do these orchestra shows.' Now we have 45 shows and do 80 nights a year."

The Pink Floyd show consists of two parts: the first features a selection of music from the 1970s by Supertramp, Jethro Tull, Kate Bush and material from Pink Floyd's concept album The Wall. The second part is the entire 45-minutes of The Dark Side of the Moon, Brennan's favourite Floyd creation.

"Just like the opening song Speak to Me, it just spoke to me," he says. "It has a special mood to it, and the fact it is a suite appealed to me. There was nothing like it at the time; it was so cool. I remember lying on the floor, as everybody seemed to do in those days, and having it on and getting lost in it. Yes appealed to me at the time, and early Genesis and ELP (Emerson, Lake & Palmer), but as much as I liked those bands the Pink Floyd thing was sublime in its own way."

The orchestra doesn't act simply as the backup band to the guitar, bass, drums and vocal setup. It is an integral part of the experience, handling many leads and famous solos, Brennan says.

If it was any other way the musicians playing the music would get uncomfortably numb from being nothing more than accessories, he says, which would come across to the audience, resulting in a less than (inter) stellar experience.

"My job is a funny balance," Brennan says. "Regardless of what show we're doing, you don't want to compromise a great pop song because it might not have needed something initially, like a string section or horns. You have to give respect to the song while giving the musicians interesting music to play so they enjoy it, not just have them sitting there playing three whole notes or something.

"There will always be some people from the classical world that say this is not their cup of tea, and I can respect that, but we've found over the years musicians have been as happy to play Led Zeppelin as they are Beethoven or Andrew Lloyd Webber. All they want to do is play good music."

The shows serve as more than just a trip down memory lane by acting like a bridge between two genres of music that might not normally be associated with each other. At a Jeans SSRqn Classics concert, symphony fans are introduced to classic rock and more mainstream music and rock fans get to experience an orchestra, something they might not normally do, Brennan says.

Pink Floyd's art rock lends itself naturally to the orchestral overhaul, but Jeans SSRqn Classics takes on artists and genres not normally associated with full string sections or woodwinds, including Michael Jackson (currently in development for next season), ABBA and Prince.

"We just did a brand new show called Guilty Pleasures with songs you're embarrassed to admit you like: everything from Styx to Britney Spears, with many stops in between," he says. "Toxic by Britney was a blast to play with an orchestra. We had five singers and everyone adored it. It was a funny, funny thing. It's not symphonic rock, it's symphonic pop."

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca

Concert preview

Dark Side of the Moon: The Music of Pink Floyd

Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra

Centennial Concert Hall

Friday and Saturday 8 p.m.; Sunday 2 p.m.

Tickets $27.55 to $88.75 at Ticketmaster, WSO Box Office

All that you touch, all that you see...

Pink Floyd's 1973 concept album The Dark Side of the Moon is one of the most influential, critically acclaimed and huge-selling discs of all time. Recorded at London's Abbey Road Studios, it was the eighth studio recording by the British band, then consisting of Roger Waters, David Gilmour, Nick Mason and Richard Wright.

Has been called "one of the bleakest of all rock albums." The themes include the stress of modern life and the threat of mental illness, in part reflecting the breakdown of former band member Syd Barrett.

Produced two singles, Money and Us and Them.

The album, with its iconic sleeve depicting a light beam passing through a prism, includes snippets of voices reflecting on madness, violence and death. The most famous recorded comments came from the Irish doorman at the studio.

It consistently ranks high on critics' and fans' lists of the greatest albums of all time. On the aggregate website bestalbumsever.

com, it currently ranks second, topped only by Radiohead's OK Computer, an album that is often compared to the seminal Pink Floyd disc.

It stayed on the Billboard album chart for 741 weeks from 1973 to 1988, longer than any other album in history. It has sold an estimated 45 million copies and has been remastered and re-released twice.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition March 24, 2011 D3