When James Lowe first heard The Smashing Pumpkins’ double album “Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness” in 1995, he was leading his own rock band, Backwash.

“It was influential for me,” says Lowe, a Grammy-nominated composer, director and arranger. “Of course, it’s iconic. I remember listening to it and loving it.” Now Lowe is working with Billy Corgan, Pumpkins’ front man and lead songwriter, to transform the nineties alternative-rock classic into a work for the Lyric Opera. Lowe talks with Newcity about collaborating with the Lyric and Corgan on “A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness,” which has its world premiere in November in celebration of the album’s thirtieth anniversary. Lowe will conduct the orchestra, and Michael Black the chorus.

James Lowe, photo courtesy of the artist

How did you get involved with this project?

I’d worked with the Lyric several times. I did the last two “West Side Story” productions, and “Oklahoma” a few years ago. So I’ve known everyone at the Lyric for a long time and do a lot of composing and arranging and that kind of creative work. A lot of what I do is hybrid—I work in the opera world but I’ve also worked in musical theater, in the pop and rock areas and jazz. The Lyric contacted me and asked me if I’d like to orchestrate [“Mellon Collie”]. I met with Billy and everyone at the Lyric and saw what he and they were after. It made sense to me, being that I knew Billy was from Chicago and I know he’s been a big fan of classical music.

What was it like arranging it for orchestra and a full chorus?

It’s been really fascinating. The first thing [I knew] about the album and always loved about it is just the sheer variety of music on it. It’s so epic in scope. It goes from really heavy rock to things with orchestra on them already. There are so many levels and layers. Our first conversation was: “How do we go about this and what do we do?” And the first thing Billy said to me was, “I don’t want to make the orchestra rock and I don’t want to play a rock band with the orchestra. I want to meet the opera, the chorus, the soloists on their turf.” I thought that was a really cool idea and really unique and really fitting to Billy. It’s his aesthetic. Because he loves this music.

The first thing we did is Billy talked a lot about styles for each song. He has a real depth of knowledge of the classical repertoire. So he would say things like, “Think of this as Mahler in scope,” or “Think of this as intimate and chamber-y.” There were a lot of discussions of style for each song. I make little arrangements and demos and send them to him. And he sends them back and we go back and forth and have had a lot of discussions. Originally it all comes from his vocabulary with adjectives and his kind of stylistic ideas, what instruments might work where.

Can you give examples of how it works with some of the songs, like “Tonight, Tonight?” That one already has a string arrangement.

It’s kind of the way it appears on the album. That’s the easiest one, actually, because it’s already there. We’re departing from it in another guise. It appears in a couple of ways… “To Forgive” has some strings already. I can listen to that and say there’s no reason to not do what’s already there.

But some songs we’re taking in a completely different direction. Things like “Jellybelly,” which is such a heavy rock song—it’s not advisable to try to imitate what’s created on the album. So we’ve taken it to a completely different level, style, tempo, everything. Some of the songs are closer to the album and some of the songs are going to be quite a departure, a reimagining.

Billy Corgan/Photo: John Shaw, Lyric Opera of Chicago

As a fan of the album, has it been difficult for you to say, “Hey, Billy, I’d like to try something completely different?”

He is so incredibly open about it. My very first question to him was, what do we do about the drums, the songs with these big iconic drum parts. He said, “Don’t think in those terms. We’re going to find a new way, a new imagining.”

That freed me up to say we want the orchestra to sound like an orchestra and how does an orchestra play rhythm as opposed to how a rock band plays rhythm? They have different vocabularies and different things that work well and don’t work well for each.

He’s been great about “What if we try this? Why don’t we try something different?” I’m a fan of the album. So my first instinct wouldn’t be to mess with it because it’s so good, but on the other hand this reimagining, what we’re coming up with is really fun and I’m really excited for people to hear it.

How are you using the chorus? It was mostly Billy singing on the album.

A couple of the songs will be completely choral. Billy’s first inspiration with this was the Mozart “Requiem.” He saw a performance and that gave him the lightbulb.

Some of the songs are for the chorus, some are for tenor, some for soprano. Some Billy will sing. The chorus will also sing in many songs that have a soloist. Several of the songs are all the soloists and the chorus, some are just one soloist. [The soloists will be soprano Sydney Mancasola, mezzo-soprano Zoie Reams, tenor Dominick Chenes and baritone Edward Parks.]

A song like “Porcelina of the Vast Oceans” I think has everybody singing on it at some point. A song like “Muzzle” is basically two singers but with also a chorus. They come and go and sometimes they’re featured, just like in any concert work of that type.

Are you arranging it conceptually, like having a day part and a night part? [The CD and cassette versions of the album were divided into two discs, “Dawn to Dusk” and “Twilight to Starlight.”]

It’s not in that kind of order. It’s not a specific narrative. Some things are different than on the album and of course we’re not doing every single song. We’re not binding ourselves to that idea.

You did great work on arranging Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” [Lowe was nominated for a Grammy Award for his work on the “Anything Goes” Broadway revival cast album]. That’s a very different kind of music, as are “Oklahoma” and “West Side Story.” Is this like anything you’ve done before?

It’s not one-hundred-percent of what I’ve done before. I played in a band and I conduct orchestras and none of it’s that different… I approach everything with whatever style it is. If I’m conducting “Oklahoma,” I want to conduct it like “Oklahoma.” If I’m conducting “La Bohème,” I want to do “La Bohème.” I want to try to meet everything where it lives.

The last thing I did that was similar to this is a jazz opera called “Songbird,” which was based on “La Périchole” by Offenbach but set in New Orleans in the twenties, so it had kind of a Louis Armstrong jazz band with it. So it was completely rearranging that music to sound like New Orleans in the twenties… This is of course not that, but it’s a similar idea of taking something and moving it to another realm because it’s a really cool way to merge these genres. I actually love that and I love that Billy wanted to do it.

Most of the people who are fans of “Mellon Collie” are a certain type of music fan who is open to experimentation, and I think Billy thinks that too. His fans are not married to only one way of hearing things. He plays things differently live sometimes and he plays different versions of things. He clearly has a wide variety of styles that he likes and that he’s into. I think it makes a lot of sense and I think people are going to really love it.

But no, I’ve never taken a rock album and scored it as a classical piece. Most bands, when they do this, like Metallica playing with a symphony orchestra, it’s Metallica playing with some strings playing along. That’s not what this is. I can’t think of another example that’s exactly like what we’re doing here.

Billy Corgan (right) with Lyric Opera’s Enrique Mazzola and John Mangum/Photo: Michael Brosilow.

I did hear Rachel Barton Pine playing Metallica, arranged for violin, which was very cool. Do you think there’s more of an acceptance in the classical community that rock music is just music, and we can arrange it in different ways?

Oh, yes. I think since I was a music student, back in the day, things have changed a lot. People that are now my age grew up listening to this music, so it’s not like when I was a kid and there were teachers saying “Don’t listen to that music!” But they grew up in a different era.

Now everyone out there working, especially musicians that are younger than me, classical musicians, they come from the conservatory and they’ve been listening to pop and rock music since they were kids. I don’t think most people today want to see these things compartmentalized. I think people are much more open than people give them credit for. That’s what’s so cool about the Lyric. They did a hip-hop opera [“The Factotum’’ in 2023 blended hip-hop, gospel funk and rap] and they’re doing these musical theater pieces and I think it’s great.

Let’s say you’re an eighty-year-old Lyric Opera subscriber, or an eighteen-year-old who has never listened to The Smashing Pumpkins. What would you tell them about this music—why should they come?

It’s funny you say that because Billy said that in a conversation we had. If an opera fan or classical music fan or subscriber decides to take a chance on this, Billy’s comment was “I want it to be beautiful, I want them to come away saying it was beautiful. My fans will come along for the ride. My fans will give it a shot, because they’re interested in that kind of variety. They’re already open because the album is so varied anyway.” But the idea that this wants to be a beautiful evening of music spoke to me as I was working on it because I’m aware that’s the goal.

What I would say to someone coming is just open your mind and listen to it like you’d listen to anything else. It’s obviously going to sound more symphonic than rock ‘n’ roll because it’s an orchestra and a chorus and soloists. It’s not a rock band on stage.

“A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness” at the Lyric Opera, 20 North Wacker Drive, November 21-30.

Published in the print edition of the September 2025 issue, with the headline “A Nineties Icon Transformed: ‘A Night of Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness’ for the Lyric Opera.”