This live orchestral rendition of the first Stars Wars movie played to a captive audience. The event was testimony to the phenomenal appeal of this serialised space fantasy – a generation that grew up with the 1977 movie were out in force along with two more recent generations. This concert could have been a success played anywhere in the world – a prime concert for the Western suburbs, at the grand Rooty Hill Coliseum venue. The enthusiasm was witnessed in strong applause for the Twentieth Century Fox logo refrain, and the warmth of interval and conclusion applauses, and queues for photographic add-ons in the foyer. It was a family night – although ticket prices if anything seemed higher than normal SSO concerts.
The Orchestra could do no wrong. The Oscar winning film score by John Williams was a musical gift – both strong in its own right and familiar to audiences, the performance was welded to the screened event. So synced to the movie images, seen on a very large screen above the orchestra with the high quality audio in the superb acoustics of the Concert Hall, it was hard to discern the music except as a layer in a movie format. Enough to say all parts of the orchestra rose to the occasion, with ample opportunity for string and percussion in particular to feature against foreboding shots of other planets, and glimpses of space travel.
The only apparent glitch was not with the SSO but with the supplied movie version. In the middle of the first part, at the famous intergalactic bar scene, the original music score was not removed from the screened movie. The lovely club-like jazz composition – an orchestral gift – was heard as recorded for the film. The SSO was left mute and still for what seemed like a long time.
Despite its serialised title, STAR WARS : EPISODE IV : A NEW HOPE was the first of a succession of movies that singlehandedly helped define space narratives (for film and games). It came out almost ten years after Kubrick’s 2001, yet both movies responded to a cultural gap – the need for narrative, indeed mythology, to respond to the hyper-realism of space travel, astronauts, landing on the moon and high resolution images of the universe – that emerged from the 1960’s. There is no question that Kubrick cut the cloth in this regard, including the timing of his release, so soon after circumnavigation of the moon and the moon landing, by Apollo 8 and Apollo 11, and the impeccable artistry of his realisation of spacecraft.
Personally, I was never a fan of Stars Wars. Its narrative was just too constructed and efficient, although it certainly intrigued on first viewing. 30 years later, STAR WARS : EPISODE IV
can look a bit tired in its effects and sets. We must remember that Lucas was probably working in the now forgotten genre of the movie house serials, with their melodrama, cliff hangers and fairly crude sets and staging. Of course, the hard core and vast fan base that Lucas created, including the vast majority of the Opera House audience, will have none of such judgment. For them the film has allure and artistry all its own. This appeal can be explained because Star Wars repeats the achievement of 2001, even if more directly. Underneath the style of a popular children’s fantasy, the resonance of truth and imagination play in probings of a human odyssey that fosters a new mythology, at a time when culture needed it.
It appears that Lucas was surprised by the impact of what he thought would probably be a B grade work of fair success. But the nature of the Stars Wars phenomenon was there to be witnessed in this Concert Hall performance.
I reviewed the performance of STAR WARS at the Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House on the 15th August 2025.
