By SHARON EBERSON
An impossible task, it would seem to be, choosing symphonic soundtracks and creating a concert representing the breadth of movie music.
It may be stating the obvious, but a good place to start is John Williams.
conductor Jacob Joyce
“The GOAT” of creating music for film, conductor Jacob Joyce called the five-time Oscar winner. In the Mad About the Movies concert on Thursday at Heinz Hall, Joyce led the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in two samples of Williams’ genius for complementing music, character and cinematic magic.
It was a night when the Heinz Hall courtyard was open to the public for a Garden Party, with drinks, snacks, movie trivia and mingling in the summer heat, while inside, the orchestra was transporting the audience to cinematic experiences, sans screen and images.
Williams (the “Flying Theme” from E.T.; and themes from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) and the late Italian composer Ennio Morricone (the love theme from Cinema Paradiso) represented works written strictly for the movies. The concert also represented works, by the likes of Richard Strauss, Ludwig Van Beethoven and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, that have been incorporated into movies, some of them so much so that we come to think of the work as a movie’s theme song.
There is no better example of the latter phenomenon than hearing the first notes of the Sunrise fanfare from Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra – perhaps best known today as the opening theme of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Or so I thought.
At a post-show Q&A, a preteen attendee told Joyce and a trio of musicians that it also was used in Toy Story 2.
Without screens to prompt memories, the music was reaching out to a multigenerational audience in different ways.
A unifying piece, for lovers of Looney Tunes, is Rossini’s overture to The Barber of Seville, or as many of us also know it, the musical accompaniment to The Rabbit of Seville – a beloved Bugs Bunny cartoon, in which Bugs walks into a production of the opera buffa and assumes several roles, outwitting the hunter Elmer Fudd (perhaps you can tell it is one of my favorites).
In its pure form, minus the “wascally wabbit,” the musicianship revealed delicacy and finesse to go along with the humor and urgency that drives the piece.
It might be considered cheating to pick a Mozart work, in this case, Symphony No. 25, written when the brilliant rascal was 17, and incorporated into the movie Amadeus. Conductor Joyce explained that it was a work that sparked a move toward drama in symphonies to come.
That was followed by the somber and haunting Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber, which was used in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Platoon, and, Joyce said, was played at the funeral of President John Kennedy, accompanying the procession to Arlington National Cemetery.
To carry the audience into intermission, the choice was Willliams’ “Flying Theme” from E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, featuring Jennifer Steele on the familiar piccolo solo that conjures flights of fancy and a boy on a bicycle, with his alien buddy, silhouetted in front of a full moon.
After intermission came another throwback, to Disney’s 1940 feature-length Fantasia, a seminal animated movie that featured conductor Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, inspired by Paul Dukas’ lively 1897 piece of that name, immediately conjured out-of-control mops and Mickey Mouse’s frantic efforts to stop them.
A highlight of the night followed, with Regi Papa stepping out front for a beautiful violin solo to the seductive Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso.
In The King’s Speech, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 underpins the story of King George VI, played by Colin Firth, who works with a speech therapist to deliver the words that will inspire his kingdom as it enters World War II.
The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra delivered on the Symphony’s second movement, in A major, Opus 97, II, Allegretto, a boisterous, tuneful composition, with flights of rhythmic fancy, first presented at a concert for wounded soldiers of the Napoleonic Wars. Beethoven has been quoted as saying at the time, “We are moved by nothing but pure patriotism and the joyful sacrifice of our powers for those who have sacrificed so much for us.”
For the finale, Joyce and the PSO returned to Williams, this time with pieces of the soundtrack from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’ Stone.
As soon as the sounds of the celesta keyboard rose from the stage, I could picture Hedwig, Harry’s noble owl, soaring.
At the Q&A afterward, with Joyce, Papa, Steele and Douglas Rosenthal, the PSO’s associate principal trombonist, many of the questions were about syncing live music to what was happening on the screen, when the orchestra accompanies full-length movies or scenes – next up, a Marvel Infinity Saga concert on August 2.
Mad About the Movies was another sort of showcase for the orchestra, a music-only insight into cinematic character and mood, as an essential element in the sauce that stirs up movie magic.
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