Elvis Costello: Not just punching the clock

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The last concert on this year's Deer Valley Music Festival won't just be the Utah Symphony's first collaboration with rock icon Elvis Costello -- it will be Costello's only appearance with an orchestra in North America this year.

"It's a pretty rich brew," Costello promised in a phone interview from Vancouver, B.C., where he lives with his wife, jazz musician Diana Krall, and their 2 1/2-year-old twin sons. The family was packing to accompany Krall to a few concerts in the Intermountain West (including the July 31 show at Salt Lake City's Red Butte Garden) before Costello took off for Japan with his rock band, the Imposters. (He'll wrap up the summer with a 15-city tour with his roots-rock band, The Sugarcanes.)

"There's nothing in which it will be like a rock band with a symphony," Costello said of the Utah show, adding he finds the typical rock 'n' roll-meets-orchestra model unsatisfying: "It's not an intelligent use of these wonderful players."

The Deer Valley concert will be a departure for Costello, who has been teaming with classical ensembles for years. Past symphonic collaborations have featured his ballet score, "Il Sogno," on the program's first half. For this show, Costello has several new arrangements of tunes from his wide-ranging three-decade career -- most orchestrated by him, but some in cooperation with Krall and others -- and is itching to try them out. He plans to perform some selections with the Utah Symphony, some with a rhythm section and some with longtime cohort Steve Nieve at the piano.

"Some of these [arrangements] might be performed only a handful of times," he said. "The experience of performing them is very thrilling. There could be just one time to hear this version, this rendition. ... It's a chance to play and celebrate an aspect that is sometimes lost when it's about the machine, about moneymaking and selling records and reinforcing a brand."

Costello is curious about how the concert will be received. After all, he said, "It's not in the model of my initial appearance on the scene."

When he plays with orchestras, he occasionally encounters "an assumption that pop musicians must be imbeciles," he said. "Then in rehearsal they discover that [the arrangements are] intricate. The sound of the orchestra is really celebrated in these arrangements; it's not pop music in funny clothes." He dropped a few hints about the playlist, which will include "a really witty arrangement" of the 1979 single "Green Shirt" that he wrote with Nieve. "It isn't faithful to the letter -- that would be nonsensical."

In the years since his 1977 debut, the British-born Costello has proved himself one of the most versatile and inventive figures in contemporary music. He has collaborated with a dizzying array of luminaries in just about every field -- Burt Bacharach, Paul McCartney, Anne Sofie von Otter, Allen Touissant, Lucinda Williams and Fall Out Boy, to scratch the surface. He filled in as guest host on David Letterman's "Late Show" when Letterman was out with the shingles, and he is host of the Sundance Channel's "Spectacle," on which he interviews and performs with an eclectic lineup of musicians. Reflecting on his career, "Nearly everything has surprised me," he said. "I didn't sit and plan everything out." He finds it especially gratifying "that curiosity alone could sustain so much change in the opportunities that have come to me."

Is there any genre of music that doesn't interest him? "I'm sure there is, but I don't sit around thinking about music I don't like."

His ventures into classical music have been instructive. Creating the album "The Juliet Letters" with the Brodsky String Quartet "spurred me to come to grips with musical notation. Before that, I'd had no real need. I played my music and it was fairly simple. But in working with other people, some ideas can get lost in translation. ... I felt I wasn't keeping my side of the bargain."

He loves now being able to "detail exactly what happens, the weight or delicacy that things have." He said he also learned a lot about orchestration from Michael Tilson Thomas, who conducted the recording of "Il Sogno" and "critiqued it in a very creative way."

"The headliners in pops shows can often push the orchestra to the back of the stage, not physically but artistically," said former Utah Symphony | Utah Opera artistic-operations VP Jeff Counts, who booked Costello before taking a similar post with the Baltimore Symphony. Counts was confident that wouldn't be the case with Costello, based on the Rock and Roll Hall of Famer's reputation. "I always felt he would not only respect the orchestra, but use it in a very intelligent way."

"He's such a smart musician, as he's proved over three decades," said Crystal Young-Otterstrom, US | UO's manager of audience development and print media. "You can hear it in his music."