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Steve Hackman is many things — a composer, conductor, producer, pianist, vocalist and DJ. He’s also a big Beatles fan.
Hackman, who’s emerged as a prominent voice on the current classical music scene, first fell in love with the songs and sound of the Fab Four around age 13, when he was introduced to their music by his sister.
“I pretty much became obsessed,” he recalled of his history with the Liverpudlian icons.
The Beatles became central to his musical experience as a high-schooler and their work remains important to him to this day.
“It feels like so much a part of me; it’s music I know inside out,” he said, acknowledging that he shares that feeling with many other fans.
The group’s popularity has endured for decades and has influenced countless other musicians over the years. In Hackman’s case, he’s taken his longtime love of the band and interwoven it with his classical chops to create “And I Love Her: The Beatles Re-Imagined,” a concert coming to Stanford’s Frost Amphitheater July 16 as part of the Stanford Live Arts Festival.
The production “sees the Beatles through the lens of the women that inspired them,” Hackman said, “of their mothers, of their wives, and also the female characters that they created through their music, of which there are so many colorful ones.”
At Frost, the show will feature a string quartet and piano alongside guitar, bass and drums, accompanying four vocalists. “The interplay between the classical quartet and band is something I think audiences will really enjoy,” he said. “That variation of styles – kind of my trademark – is something I look forward to sharing.”
Hackman created the show last summer.
“We were as a country – as we still are – dealing with the rights of women being very much under attack; women were really on my mind,” he said.
Female characters loom large in the Beatles canon. Both Paul McCartney and John Lennon lost their mothers at a young age, and those relationships are reflected in the music.
“That had a profound effect on young John and Paul, and it bound them together in this tragic way,” Hackman said. “When you look at their songwriting you see the traces of their mothers, evoking them, singing to them so often, most famously of course in ‘Let it Be,’ and ‘Julia.’” The former, sung in “And I Love Her” by Rachel Gonzales, is especially meaningful to Hackman, who includes it in the show as a tribute to his own mother as well.
The Beatles catalog is also full of romantic love songs, of course, and as Hackman stated, portraits of vivid characters created or paid tribute to by the songwriters. The titular “Lady Madonna,” for example, is McCartney’s “kind of homage to the miracle of motherhood,” inspired by a woman he saw in a magazine. There’s “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” “Dear Prudence,” “Michelle,” and “the list goes on,” he said, naming “Blackbird” as one of his favorites in the production.
“The message of ‘Blackbird,’ Paul’s song that was speaking to the Civil Rights movement in America, it’s just as essential as ever,” he said.
Looking at cherished favorites from a different point of view has been a gratifying experience, Hackman said.
“It was pretty amazing to sort of be able to — not fall in love again because I’m already in love with them — but reimagine them with this sort of alternative creative impetus in mind that was guiding me,” he said.
Hackman is no stranger to the Bay Area. He’s conducted for the San Francisco Symphony (and will do so again July 23), and in February brought a smaller-scale production to Stanford Live’s Bing Studio, giving local audiences a taste of his unique fusion style.
Over the last decade, the classically trained Hackman has made it his focus and mission to bring the classical and popular music worlds together, “creating hybrid compositions that synthesize the two in interesting and compelling ways,” he said.
What makes one piece of music “classical” and the other “popular?” That question is at the heart of Hackman’s approach.
“I just don’t see the lines between them. I didn’t grow up in a household where music was judged whether it was classical or any other form. I grew up agnostically when it came to music,” he said. “I found the more I rose up the ranks in the classical music world and got to the ‘elite’ level, the more estranged I thought classical music was getting from the music most people were listening to. This has really been my attempt to rectify that and bring them together.”
Some of his fusion projects have included “Brahms V. Radiohead,” “Tchaikovsky V. Drake,” “The Resurrection Mixtape” (Mahler V. Notorious BIG V. Tupac Shakur), and “Beethoven V. Coldplay.”
“This music has much more in common than we think. Beethoven was the Beatles of his day,” he said. “It’s often the marketing, people trying to put things in a box, and oftentimes I think those labels are inaccurate.”
There is sometimes the mistaken impression, he said, that “classical music is complex and full of this virtuosity and technique, and somehow popular music is devoid of this kind of mastery and complexity. The Beatles are an example of how that’s not true.”
The Beatles, of course, were also mixing pop and rock music with classical influences back in the 1960s. Remember the string arrangement on “Eleanor Rigby” (another memorable female character) or the orchestral majesty of “A Day in the Life.” The band’s musically adventurous spirit is part of what has always attracted Hackman to it.
“I’m drawn to music that sort of makes its own rules. They quickly figured out through hard work and writing, and just their ingenuity, how to filter their own creativity through all those styles they’d learned,” he said. “What you hear is such an authentic voice, it creates a whole new set of rules that then everyone else copies. I think that’s what the best music does.”
“And I Love Her: The Beatles Re-Imagined” will be performed at Frost Amphitheater, 351 Lasuen St., Stanford, on Sunday, July 16, at 6:30 p.m. Tickets start at $35. More information is available at live.stanford.edu.
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