CLASSICS AT THE MOVIES / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

 

CLASSICS AT THE MOVIES

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Victoria Concert Hall

Friday (27 September 2024)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 30 September 2024 with the title "SSO goes to the movies with feel-good concert with familiar soundtracks".

What would movies be without music? Silent. Even silent movies of the 1920s were accompanied by musicians performing live. In this Singapore Symphony Orchestra concert led by the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra’s resident conductor Gerard Salonga, the full range of moods and emotions provided by movie music was revealed to superb effect. 

Some of the music had been written many years before the advent of film, such as Franz von Suppe’s light-hearted Poet and Peasant Overture which opened the show. Salonga, who was also the concert’s affable host, recounted this to be madcap music heard in Looney Tunes cartoons, but this reviewer remembers washing detergent advertisements on television. 

Original music written for films would however predominate, including Maurice Jarre’s Building The Barn from Witness. This was the Harrison Ford-starred feature with the Amish, which thrived on fulsome string tones representing Americana at its most homespun. Similarly, Christopher Young’s Murder In The First, with echoes of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, sounded just as congenial and sumptuous despite its title. 

A completely different string sonority permeated Bernard Herrmann’s Suite from Psycho. Astringent ostinatos reminiscent of Shostakovich and a stress-laden quasi-Prokofiev melody ratcheted up the tension. Then the infamous shrieking strings arrived, a stabbing jump scare with the suddenness of Janet Leigh being offed behind the shower curtain. Movie music is deemed most effective when there is a collective gasp from the audience. 

There were solos too, with concertmaster Chan Yoong Han kept busy on the violin in Argentinian composer Carlos Gardel’s tango Por Una Cabeza with a rose stalk clasped between his lips. Far more serious were Three Pieces from John Williams’ score for Schindler’s List, channeling Jewish melancholy and Klezmer dances, in remembrance of the Nazi genocide in a Krakow ghetto. 

The other soloist was Filipino soprano Lara Maigue in two popular operatic arias by George Frideric Handel. Lascia Ch’io Pianga from Rinaldo was a display of pristine lines and feeling, while Ombra Mai Fu from Xerxes (better known as Handel’s Largo) was the epitome of baroque beauty. Both songs figured in the movie celebrating the legendary castrato Farinelli. Her encore was the wordless Winter Shades by Danish composer Soren Hyldgaard, a vocalise of seamless melismata. 

Howard Shore’s Suite from Silence of the Lambs, including the somber Main Title and Hannibal’s Escape, plunged the concert back into the realm of horror movies, but that was short lived. Nothing brings a smile more than the intergalactic jazz of Cantina Band from Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope by Williams, where woodwinds, brass and percussion had their field day. 

The official programme had ended but Salonga and the orchestra had two more numbers up their sleeves in Alan Silvestri’s ruminative Main Theme from Cast Away and one of pop music’s greatest ever hits. Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale, inspired by J.S.Bach’s Air on the G String, had been featured in movies and covered more than one could possibly remember. With Joanna Paul’s pipe organ solo entering the fray, that provided a feel-good end to two hours of good music.