Above: SSO and conductor Nicholas Buc. Featured image: Sydney Opera House Concert Hall was enhanced with lighting by Matthew Tunchon. Photo credit: Craig Abercrombie.
Sydney Symphony Orchestra has been sharing the power of film scores with local audiences for some time. Their series of live soundtrack events journeying through the Harry Potter franchise are stuff of local sold out concert legend. At the end of next month they present Black Panther Live in Concert to Film.
Bringing an eager audience in droves for a short run , The Music of Hans Zimmer- Greatest Film Scores Live in Concert was produced in association with Concert Lab . Excellent sound design by Des O’Neil and aFX Global harnessed the forces of amplified SSO instrumentalists joined by drum kit, keyboards, extended percussion and guitars for this concert-tutorial.
This excitingly lit, endearingly comic tutorial commentary from experts is one of the most entertaining musicology lectures you will have for some time. This cleverly graded and structured study had SSO and guest musicians on hand for short demonstrations of Hans Zimmer’s signature techniques as well as the unravelling of his thematic material and compositional methods.
Above: (l to r) Hosts Andrew Pogson and Dan Golding from ‘Art of the Score. Photo credit: Craig Abercrombie.
Superb crossover commentary and MC spots with a gentle didactic edge were securely provided by Dan Golding and Andrew Pogson from the film music podcast Art of The Score.
They provided history of Zimmer’s career, fun facts, personal opinion and snippets of high level musical analysis. Included topics were Zimmeresque approaches to orchestration, emotion and motivic development. Also, musical borrowings or reflections, rhythmic and harmonic augmentation or diminution were revealed as ingenious compositional tools depending on his film music assignment.
Art of the Score’s dynamic duo gave guidance from the front of the stage between film excerpts or suites. They provided informed background to film scores, gave demonstration intros and had dialogue to prompt their fellow podcaster and here super clear conductor of SSO-plus, Nicholas Buc. All commentary was fun, detailed and easily accessible.
We heard twelve score excerpts or suites from some of the largest films of the late twentieth century to now. Four times we heard his collaborations with other composers (in Pirates of the Carribean Suite, ‘Ogway Ascends’ from Kung Fu Panda, The Dark Knight Suite and Gladiator Suite)
We also were beautifully reminded that Zimmer composed excellently characterised soundscapes for the movies Sherlock Homes, Driving Miss Daisy, The Thin Red Line, The Da Vinci Code, The Lion King and The Holiday.
Above: Vocalist Jacqueline Dark joined the SSO for the finale to this concert, ‘Gladiator Suite’ with music by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerard. Photo credit: Craig Abercrombie.
The last suite contains a collaboration with Australian vocalist and composer Lisa Gerard. Lisa’s song ‘Now We Are Free’ with original emotional language for the text was here delivered with penetrating atmosphere by accomplished vocalist Jacqueline Dark.
Combined with SSO’s consisted detailing and speckled lighting effects which covered the Concert Hall’s stalls and dress circle, plus painted the walls with cascading LED lights, this last suite was delivered with the fitting atmospheric magic that Zimmer’s music and scores contain.
Audience members were engulfed during this concert by a solid event of musical wizardry for this cinemascope night at the Sydney Opera House. This inception of such a well-explained, amazingly lit, dreamily layered collaboration concept with interstellar playing would do well to continue. Such concerts would be a great companion to the also sell-out ‘Live In Concert To Film’ SSO products.
It was a night at the movies, at the Opera House with a fantiastic edge of music apprection to stretch the modern curious and fan-mind alike.
