The Music of Lord of the Rings and Beyond
Playhouse Theatre - 03/09/22
When I was a young warthog, or at least a young singer, four of my ambitions were: to sing at La Scala, Milan, to appear in a Raymond Gubbay concert, to appear on ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ at the Hippodrome, Golders Green and to sing at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Dear Reader, I fulfilled two of those ambitions, but I never made it to the Hippodrome, and I never got to sing for Raymond Gubbay!
However, last night at the Playhouse, I was privileged to enjoy an excellent concert of music from various fantasy films and television series, promoted by that same Mr Gubbay, still going strong at the age of 74!
The date has been in the diary for a few months, as our son and his partner had flagged this concert up as something they wanted to treat us to. Our shared love for fantasy films made this a no-brainer as a family outing, and so we combined it with a delightful meal at Rollo’s in Broughton Street as well.
It was my first venture into the Playhouse for some years, and I was hit by a huge wave of nostalgia as I remembered singing there with Scottish Opera in the early 1980s. Before the Festival Theatre became an operatic venue, Scottish Opera used to play the King’s for medium scale operas and the Playhouse for blockbusters. Our performance of Bizet’s ‘The Pearl Fishers’, with me as the High Priest, Nourabad, clad in a hugely expensive costume made largely from black bin bags, was at the time, and possibly remains so to this day, the largest indoor audience for any opera in Scotland, ever. The capacity of 3,059 was achieved that night!
Last night looked pretty close to a full house, and it was wonderful to see such a range of ages and dress styles on view. Listening in to chat in the bars and foyers, it was clear that a lot of the audience were at their first live performance with a full symphony orchestra, and the reaction seemed wildly enthusiastic. Oh to capture some of these people for classical concerts with the RSNO and SCO!
Mr Gubbay’s enterprise brought us the Scottish Concert Orchestra and Scottish Concert Voices, two ad hoc groups of top class professional musicians, who played the programme with gusto and much enthusiasm. The conductor, Toby Purser, making his Edinburgh debut, is Head of Conducting at the Royal College of Music in London, and with his conductor’s hair and white jacket, he was the perfect host, with well-judged quips and useful background information. As he put it, the programme consisted of a thick doorstep sandwich, with music from Lord of the Rings as the thickly sliced bread, and suites and selections from other films and TV series as the filling. I must say that it was a delicious sandwich, and the large audience lapped it up.
To my mind, Howard Shore’s score for Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy is the finest film score from the past 30 or 40 years, matching the story perfectly, and using varying styles to wonderful effect. The big orchestra, with a large percussion section, played extremely well, with good solos from various leaders. The choir, necessarily amplified a bit, was very effective, and also produced a few decent solos. Excerpts from the Witcher, Star Wars, Game of Thrones and Pirates of the Caribbean were all tellingly played and reminded me that a lot of the finest contemporary music is being written for film and TV series. The cacophony I endured at the EIF concert towards the end of the Festival, from the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, playing two contemporary works by a Finn and a Swiss, were demonstrations of music, to my ears, wandering down a dark alley with no escape. This film music, on the other hand, was inventive, tuneful, atmospheric and popular! Most importantly, it was very good, and was wildly successful with a large untapped audience.
There is a moral there somewhere!
