UPDATED: Rocked by the living and the dead

Due to a reporting error, this story previously gave incorrect attendance numbers for the Symphonic Cinema performance. It was updated April 15 with correct numbers.

Two exhilarating greater Lansing events mixed silent film and live music last weekend. Saturdays mashup of the Lansing Symphony Orchestra and the Capital City Film Festival was great fun, but the sleeper was Sundays energized screening of Buster Keatons masterpiece, “Sherlock, Jr.,” at MSU, presented with an original score for piano and string quartet.

Some years ago, people got into watching “The Wizard of Oz” with the sound turned off and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” playing instead, claiming that the coincidences would blow your mind. Thats the rough idea behind Saturday’s concert, a pre-packaged program called Flicker thats licensed to orchestras around the country.

About an hours worth of scenes from flicks like “Nosferatu,” “The Phantom of the Opera” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” are paired with well-worn symphonic classics like “Night on Bald Mountain” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” The pieces are played all the way through, but the films are excerpted, making it more of a concert with movie accompaniment than the other way around.

The arranged marriage was awkward at times, but sound and image found many ways of making love. When Nosferatu appeared in a doorway to massively frightening blasts of brass, a few young children in the audience looked like they were about to lose it. They were later comforted when a plucked pizzicato passage percolated up just as Charlie Chaplin poked a man’s posterior with a pitchfork. Sheer acceleration wasnt enough to make “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” do any justice to Buster Keatons “The General,” but the Nordic swells of Jean Sibelius “Finlandia” fit the Babylonian decadence of D.W. Griffiths “Intolerance” surprisingly well.

For a grand finale, sexy robot Maria from “Metropolis” came to life — hula hoops of energy caressing up and down her metal form — as the symphony rocketed through the final chords of Stravinskys “Firebird.” Talk about offering something for everyone! The audience of over 800 people, with a far greater number of under-30s than you find at most symphony concerts, seemed to be having a grand time.

The concert brought two big Lansing institutions together, generated a lot of good vibrations and made a lively — if scattershot — case for the undiminished power of classical music and silent film alike.

The connoisseurs film-and-music experience came the next afternoon, as part of MSU College of Music’s “Cello Plus” chamber music series. Minnesota-based guest pianist Stephen Prutsman brought an original score for one of comic genius Buster Keatons best films, “Sherlock, Jr.”

After urging the audience to loosen up and get ready to laugh, Prutsman took his place at the piano. Keeping one eye on the film and the other on his four colleagues, he dove into the fray.

The quintet played the bejeezus out of Prutsman’s supple score, a melange of sepiatoned romanticism, Tin Pan Alley panache, oily dissonance and oddball sound effects. It was the perfect companion to a multi-layered masterpiece of American film.

Prutsman came up with a musical counterpart for almost everything Keaton put on the screen — from elaborate physical gags to the subtlest character gestures — with an undertone of melancholia Keaton would surely have appreciated. When the film cried out to shine on its own, the music just got out of the way — and Keaton surely would have appreciated that too.

Unlike Dorothys roll in the poppies with Pink Floyd, this performance left nothing to chance. The quintet timed everything literally down to the split second, perfectly punctuating even the most fleeting glances and pratfalls without losing its dizzying comic momentum. Cellist Suren Bagratuni, the brain behind the Cello Plus festival, and his three colleagues in the string quartet played like their collars were on fire, especially as the music accelerated into the jaw-dropping climactic chase scene. (Violinists Ruggero Allifranchini and I-Pei Lin, along with violist Randolph Kelly, turned out to be pretty handy on kazoo as well.)

The result was a breathtaking conquest of time. There was no gap at all between Keatons head-over-heels 1924 genius and the live energy bouncing from the walls at Fairchild Auditorium. “Sherlock, Jr.” has a happy ending, but the man next to me had tears in his eyes when the lights went up. I was right with him. Its a rare and fine thing to be rocked that hard by the living and the dead.