View from the Green Room: Orchestral movietime at SETU Arena
RTE Concert Orchestra performed Cinematic Classics at SETU Arena.
There’s a clear market for an orchestra playing well-known movie themes as a packed SETU Arena proves tonight. However, somewhere along the line, someone decided to depart from the title of this concert “Cinematic Classics” by opening it with the Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet Ballet Suite No. 2. While I’m a great fan of Prokofiev, I’m not sure that this suite fitted in with audience expectations.
Interestingly, the politics of Prokofiev’s ballet always intrigues. When he finished the score to Romeo and Juliet, Soviet officials were shocked. Though Shakespeare’s play was first published as The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet with the lovers committing suicide, Prokofiev’s ballet had a happy ending with the pair waltzing off into the sunset. However, a deeply suspicious Stalin banned it on the grounds of artistic integrity.
Nevertheless, the suite is a delight and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra’s playing is a joy. The Suite is all about storytelling. The characters emerge and the conflicts collide right from the explosive opening. Jarring chords, tuba blasts, trombone blares, thumping bass and frenzied fiddles capture the insane conflict between the Montagues and the Capulets that makes victims of Romeo and Juliet. Gentle reeds and busy strings combine to bring the romance and steel of Juliet; a slow rhythm marks Friar Lawrence’s gravity; an elegant melody marks the romance of the bedroom scene.
Every emotion is trammelled up in the conclusion – passion and pathos, tension and torment, love and longing as endgame sets in. A funeral thump from the brass and a symphonic swell from the band marks the lovers' demise.
The movie classics kick off with Barber’s incredibly moving “Adagio for Strings”, which pops up in many film and television soundtracks, including The Elephant Man, Platoon, Lorenzo's Oil and Outlander. The Adagio was also played at the funeral of Albert Einstein. It’s the emotional shove of the music and the inevitable sensuous climb of the fiddles to that exquisite top chord that makes it so popular.
Suddenly we’re in John Williams territory – winner of five Academy Awards for Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), E.T. (1982) and Schindler's List (1993). Tonight we’re in Jurassic Park where the sweep of the melody brings us back to the dawn of creation with those delightful dinosaurs walking warm into the sunlight. Jarring chords and tense strings add that crucial question of “just whose creation are we talking about?” The Williams magic pops up in Harry Potter with floating lamps, postman-owls and tables laden with sweets. No boarding school mush here, folks.
It’s name-the-movie-time as the orchestra plays a medley that runs from grisly-gashing grannies through hungry sharks, death star spaceships, aliens on bicycles, ships and ice-bergs, wolves that dance, boxers that mumble, Godfather’s that make offers that can’t be refused, home alone Christmas kids, celebrated archaeologist Mr. Jones and all the Timmy-on-Sunday-thigh-slappers that made their way home from the Savoy after The Magnificent Seven.
The “Love Theme” from Cinema Paradiso is the highlight of the night and the silence in the Arena speaks volumes. A couple of John Barry movie themes from James Bond, alongside Dancing With Wolves, sends us out the gap in a concert that, at a running time of less than 90 minutes including interval, is really far too short.
