Striking Toronto Symphony Orchestra members got a respite from the picket line in early October when they were recruited by Manta Eastern Sound to recreate the music behind opera virtuoso Mario Lanza for an upcoming movie about the tenor’s life and death.

The sessions – recorded for 5.1 mixing on a 48-track digital Sony machine to half-inch digital tape – were one of the few chances the musicians have had to assemble and do what they love most.

‘Ultimately, musicians just like to play music. We’re not incredibly complicated in that way,’ says David Kent, the tso’s principal timpanist and the contractor hired by Toronto-based Manta to arrange for the musicians.

‘It was very good for people to get together and play…musicians love to play music. That’s why this work stoppage doesn’t come easy.’

The 65-piece orchestra gathered in Manta’s large Studio 2 to record all the Lanza excerpts which were sung by Canadian tenor Richard Margison. An as-yet-unnamed actor will lip-synch once production actually gets underway.

Kent was also responsible for hiring some of Toronto’s best jazz musicians to record big band music that accompanied Tom Burlison, an Australian movie star who moonlights as a Frank Sinatra soundalike.

Lanza, the Philadelphia-born tenor who sky-rocketed to fame in 1951 for his portrayal of opera great Enrico Caruso in the film The Great Caruso, lived and died in a style made for the big screen. He was born to low-income Italian-American parents during the Great Depression and had a meteoric rise to fame as a tenor and a movie star. He died tragically in 1959 at age 38 under a cloud of mystery.

While the story has all the elements of a by-the-numbers Hollywood set-piece, creating the music presented a special set of hurdles. The number-one challenge, says Kevin Evans, vice-president and general manager at Manta, was working without the guidance of a director.

Evans says that while it is not unusual to record the music before photography begins in order to provide accurate audio for lip-synchs, usually musical productions will have a director on board to provide some supervision.

Australian producers Rob Girdwood, Damian Parer and Michael Harrison ‘really seem to be putting the cart before the horse,’ Evans says. ‘All the music that we have recorded here is being put together in some kind of a cd and they are looking to get record-company backing to put out a ‘Richard Margison sings Mario Lanza’ cd before even the film comes out.’

The recordings were done in 5.1 (five audio outputs plus one sub-woofer), Evans says, to accommodate every possible scenario. ‘We were covering our butts, really,’ he says, ‘because nobody was able to tell us what the end product was going to be, so we went for the top and anything can be folded down from that.’

Recording engineer Gary Grey also recorded onto both a sadie Artemis digital workstation and a Genex mo eight-track digital recorder because the Artemis allowed Grey to edit directly on the recorder while the Genex offered better a-to-d converters.

Grey and assistant engineer Annelise Noronha also brought out some vintage microphones in order to better reproduce the recorded sounds of the era.

In order not to overwork conductor David Agler, Manta set up a unique system which allowed him to go home with the musicians even before the chorus tracks were laid down. Agler was videotaped in synch with the music as he led the tso players. ‘We resynchronize the (video) and the music and set up monitors so the chorus can actually see the conductor on video, so he doesn’t have to be there, and they can take their cues from him,’ Evans explains.

He says they often use this technique and it always impresses the producers up from Los Angeles. ‘That’s kind of a nice thing we always add and when we do this, people up from Los Angeles go ‘Wow, this is a neat idea.”

Once production gets underway, Evans says Manta will get further work recording the underscore. ‘A lot of this stuff was operatic, like La Traviata, that was already written by the classical composers. So when the actual film is done, we’ve been told they will come back and do the actual film underscore.’

The Lanza project will also feature original songs recorded by Alannah Myles.