EASY Listening

Throw away your idea of a symphony orchestra consisting of men and women in black outfits playing the traditional classics while sitting formally on the Opera House stage. On Friday, Eckart Preu, the symphony’s new music director, will dress his musicians in less formal attire and take them into the normally rock-driven precincts of The Big Easy Concert House.

“People are going to ask, ‘What are they doing there? What do they want there?’ ” says the 35-year-old Preu. “What we’re aiming for is to destroy the common image that symphony musicians are not ‘fun people.’

“And what hoping for,” he adds, “is that some who are used to going to The Big Easy will hear the symphony for the first time, and some who are used to hearing the symphony at the Opera House will go to The Big Easy for the first time.”

Friday’s concert is the first time the symphony has played in a nightclub and the first time The Big Easy has had classical music.

The club will have seating for about 600 people (no mosh pit this time) and the orchestra will include about 50 players – a big band for The Big Easy stage. No smoking will be allowed, but the bars will be open.

Preu has planned a program called “Symphony on the Edge” that he hopes will bridge the gap between the two audiences.

“The Big Easy, because of its atmosphere, lends itself to experimental programming,” he says. “The challenge was to find music that would be accessible to newcomers and rewarding for people who already know symphonic music.

“This is music that is on the edge or was on the edge at the time it was composed. When I was planning this concert, I thought, ‘Why don’t we go to the roots of the 20th century, and try to find music that is accessible, that is (or was) on the edge and something that is fun and important for the orchestra to play?’ “

Concertgoers will hear some Villa Lobos, Ives, Prokofiev, Bernstein, Beethoven and Vivaldi, with lighting tricks and video projections borrowed from rock productions.

“We’re going to use the multimedia opportunities that we have there,” Preu says, “to add an appeal to the other senses besides the sense of hearing.”

He describes the program as “basically rhythm-based – music that people who are regulars at The Big Easy can relate to played in a place where rhythm really inhabits the space.”

Preu plans to open the concert with the relentlessly rhythmic finale of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and close with Ginastera’s churning “Malambo.” Somewhere in between he will include Charles Ives’ “Putnam’s Camp” from “Three Places in New England.”

“All these pieces were very much ‘on the edge’ when they were written, and so was Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons,’ ” Preu says. “In fact, the Ives is still very much on the edge even though it was written nearly 100 years ago.”

The program also includes unusual works such as John Adams’ “Tromba Lontana” and two movements from a saxophone work, “Pictures of Provence” by Paule Maurice, with the symphony’s principal saxophonist Greg Yasinitsky as soloist.

“We’re not playing down to anyone; when you are trying to attract people to classical music, you should play classical music,” Preu says.

“But what we’re doing differently from our Opera House and Met concerts is playing shorter pieces and movements of longer works that we might not play there. Some of them are familiar, but even if people have heard them before, I think they will hear them differently in a nightclub setting.”