A perfect marriage of pop and classical

Whatever plans the Beach Boys have for celebrating their 60th anniversary this year, they’ll have a hard time topping the Antwerp Philharmonic Orchestra’s new album, The Seven Symphonies: A Classical Tribute to the Beach Boys Music (Wedgeview).

For the typical orchestral pop project, a rock band’s greatest hits get transcribed for a large body of musicians who then set about turning those hits into Muzak.

This time, however, the Dutch musician Roeland Jacobs has taken 33 Beach Boys melodies, grouped them into discreet “symphonies” (several are more like overtures), hired the Belgian trombonist Dominique Vanhaegenberg to do the orchestrating, and—under titles such as “Capella,” “Beach Waltz,” “The Nearest Faraway Symphony,” and “Pet Symphony”—transformed them into something disarmingly sublime.

Sublimity isn’t a quality often associated with the Beach Boys greatest hits, rooted as so many of them are in adolescent notions of fun, fun, fun. So Jacobs has bypassed most of the band’s guaranteed crowd-pleasers in favor of relatively (and, in some cases, extremely) obscure “deep cuts.” (Four, e.g., 12 percent, come from the band’s 2012 album That’s Why God Made the Radio.)

In so doing, he illuminates why many consider Brian Wilson to be, at least by the standards of post-Presley pop, a genius.

Wilson didn’t compose or even co-­compose every Seven Symphonies melody. Several were written or co-written by his brothers Dennis (“Be With Me,” “Forever,” “Little Bird,” “Baby Blue”) and Carl (“Full Sail”), while “The Nearest Faraway Place” was composed by the Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, “Winds of Change” by King Harvest’s Ron Altbach and Ed Tuleja, and “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring” (aka “A Young Man Is Gone”) by Bobby Troup.

But Wilson composed the lion’s share. And with a 60-piece orchestra replacing the Beach Boys’ legendary four-part (and sometimes five- or six-part) vocal harmonies as well as the work of the studio musicians responsible for the blueprints, Wilson’s uniquely American visions reach new heights.

THE CLARINETIST EVAN ZIPORYN has attempted a musical transmutation of a rather different sort with his new album, Pop Channel (Islandia).

Imagine if you will the soundtrack to a film about life after worldwide nuclear annihilation in which a handful of clarinetists are the only surviving musicians. To buoy the spirits of their shell-shocked neighbors, they play requests submitted to them on charred scraps of paper because the fallout has also rendered everyone mute.

Then imagine that those neighbors, representing as they would in such a film a cross-section of the human race, have tastes ranging from Paul McCartney, Blues Image, Joni Mitchell, the Association, Jimi Hendrix, and Earth, Wind & Fire to Jaco Pastorius, the B-52s, Steely Dan, the Brothers Johnson, and McFabulous.