Post by lindahoyland on Jul 27, 2006 3:22:29 GMT
This critic obviously doesn't like the LOTR symphony much !
Now Playing...
San Diego Symphony Summer Pops: The Lord of the Rings
Bored At The Rings
Posted: 07/24/2006 at 01:04:40 PM PDT
Updated: 07/24/2006 at 01:04:35 PM PDT
by Christian Hertzog
Q. What did the music critic say after he tried to digest The Lord Of The Rings: A Symphony In Six Movements?
A. Orc!
The Lord Of The Rings Symphony is like the food at a Claim Jumper restaurant: It's okay, but nothing special, and there's way too much of it. However, just as diners seem to enjoy the huge portions at Claim Jumper, so too did the Summer Pops audience devour the LOTR Symphony, rapturously applauding an offering that lasted--including intermission--2 hours and 15 minutes.
All this listener could think was: "That was 135 precious minutes of our life we've lost, we did. We wants it back, we wants the precious!"
In short, I hated the elfen thing.
This wasn't your typical Summer Pops audience. It was a large crowd, the largest I've seen this season, and there were plenty of youngsters in the audience, kids who have probably read the trilogy of novels three times already and watched the trilogy of films twenty times. I imagine that with such prepping, the music acted as a trigger to recall various scenes from the LOTR films. The program provided them with titles of scenes, and the Jumbotron screens projected drawings and paintings reminiscent of production design sketches, which provided the audience with visual cues to remind them what happened when this music was used in the movie.
The drawings and paintings accompanying the music reminded me of those awful segments 40 years ago on NET and Captain Kangaroo, where a song or instrumental music would be accompanied by simple ink drawings, which the camera would slowly pan up or down in a lame attempt to make up for the fact that it wasn't animated, and hence, unworthy of your attention.
Check out how this work was announced in the program:
I'm surprised there wasn't a little trademark symbol after "The Lord of the Rings." If you squint really hard below the title, you can make out--why, look, someone actually composed the work!
Seven things I would have rather done instead of
attending the Lord of the Rings Symphony:
1. Alphabetize my porn collection.
2. Wax my nipples.
3. Write all those Thank You notes I've
neglected to send for all my Christmas presents.
4. Go across the street to Comic Con and engage
in intellectually stimulating discussions such as:
Who would win in a fight, Wonder Woman or
Xena Warrior Princess?
5. Iron six shirts (I'm a slow ironer).
6. Repair that old toaster which I've refused to allow
my wife to throw out for three years because I'm
going to fix it one of these days.
7. Make prank phone calls to piercing shops, asking
them if they have Prince Albert in a can.
It's unclear how much of this "symphony" is Howard Shore's, and how much of it is the effort of "Artistic Advisor & Music Editor" John Mauceri. True, Shore is credited with writing and orchestrating all the music to the film, but I wonder if he just turned Mauceri loose on the cues, saying, "Here, throw something together for me."
I like Howard Shore's film music. He's written some outstanding horror film scores that tower above the third-rate Penderecki imitators. Did he deserve Oscars for his Lord of the Rings music? Sure, it's noble, stirring stuff when accompanying images and dialogue. But you can't simply lift the music from the movie and expect it to play well on a concert stage. It's not just Howard Shore's music; this applies to most film music. Very little of it works divorced from its original function, providing emotional illumination to images and words on a theater screen.
That's why composers extract a suite from dramatic music--not just film composers, but ballet and theater composers as well. And let's get this straight--the Lord of the Rings Symphony is not a symphony, it's a suite. It's nothing more than excerpts--far too many of them--from the film score, spliced next to each other, regardless of abstract musical considerations. A symphony is a large-scale piece, usually in four or more movements, which tells a type of story in musical terms. A good symphony doesn't need images or program notes to accompany the music. The sounds themselves are arranged in such a way that nothing else is needed to experience the work. Believe it or not, the music alone can be as entertaining as a movie or a book, and in the case of the great symphonic masterpieces, much more profound.
What distinguishes a symphony from a suite, besides their respective abstract vs. dramatic conceptions, is that transitions are provided in a symphony to move the listener from one idea to the next, and these ideas are later developed, played with, elaborated upon. That's not what happens in the LOTR Symphony--we simply hop around from one musical section to the next, with no musical reason for doing so.
There's plenty of worthwhile musical material in the LOTR soundtrack to provide a resourceful composer with main and secondary themes for a symphony. But I suspect that the reason the LOTR Symphony is just a patchwork quilt of film cues is that there just wasn't enough money to make it worth a Hollywood composer's time to take a year off to construct a solid piece of music that could exist outside of a motion picture. I can think of only one concert-length piece of music derived from a film score, and that is Prokofiev's magnificent cantata from Alexander Nevsky. There are a handful of 20-minute-long suites that work well in the concert hall: Thomson's Louisiana Story, The Plow That Broke the Plains, and The River; Corigliano's The Red Violin, and Three Hallucinations (derived from Altered States); Bernstein's On the Waterfront; Hermann's Psycho Suite. Unfortunately, these are the exceptions, not the rule, and the LOTR Symphony is a textbook example of this rule. Cut down
to a half hour or less, The Lord of the Rings would no doubt be a much more enjoyable work.
Before the concert began, a gentleman walked onstage and informed us how lucky we all were that we would get to the hear the LOTR Symphony in its entirety. The only fortunate people present that I could imagine were those suffering from insomnia, whose restlessness would be cured about 20 minutes into the program.
You have to give the San Diego Symphony credit for playing almost two hours of music that they had never seen before so well. In the past, the Summer Pops orchestra was notorious for having as many substitutes as regulars on stage, but
apparently management has cracked down on this practice, making the recent hires do the Summer Pops shows. That is the audience's good fortune. Now, if only management could find some better music for these talented performers to play.
Marcus Bosch conducted with authority, and did the best he could with the heap of notes Shore and Mauceri threw at him. The San Diego Master Chorale was alternatingly vigorous and tender, dramatic and mysterious. I can't comment on their diction, as I speak neither Elf, Dwarf, nor Orc, but I imagine they had their work cut out for them as well learning the pronunciation of all those foreign languages. The St. Paul's Cathedral Choristers and St. Cecilia Choir were a lovable bunch of urchins, and if at times their intonation and ensemble was sloppy, you have to give them credit for trying.
No such qualifications need apply to the lovely Kaitlyn Lusk, the soprano who took center stage after intermission. It's astounding that she is only 16 years old. She already possesses a full, velvety tone, and moved with ease from a classical style to a pop style (the banal tune "Into the West" that anticlimactically ended the work).
Her stage presence was equally striking, a combination of chasteness and radiance and beauty. I think many of the men in the audience were thinking the same thing: that what we wanted to do to her would be illegal in this state, but hey, Kaitlyn, if you're ever in Nevada, give us a call and we'll come visit! I'd like to see this outwardly innocent maiden turn into a wild party animal in a Comic Con hotel room after she goes crunk, as these shy quiet types are often wont to do.
This time I sat about a few rows back behind the mixing board, right in the center. At first the sound was horribly tinny, particularly with the choruses. The orchestral sound improved as the evening progressed, but the choruses occasionally sounded harsh through the P.A. system.
If you want to encounter a more worthwhile Tolkien experience, visit this link.
www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2461954?htv=12
For a copy of the program, click here.http://www.sandiego.com/articlefiles/814ba855-85b0-49bc-a53f-658a037016b4/programs%2000072.jpg
P.S. As a public service for those of you reading this who might be interested to know what symphonies could possibly be better than watching a movie or reading a book, here's a list to get you started:
Beethoven: No. 5 and 7
Dvorak: the New World
Tchaikovsky: No. 4 and 5
Mendelssohn: Italian
Sibelius: No. 2 and 5
Mahler: No. 1
Mozart: No. 40
If you feel adventurous and want to experience works which try to cram everything but the kitchen sink into an hour or more, try these symphonies:
Mahler: No. 2 and 5
Ives: No. 4
Now Playing...
San Diego Symphony Summer Pops: The Lord of the Rings
Bored At The Rings
Posted: 07/24/2006 at 01:04:40 PM PDT
Updated: 07/24/2006 at 01:04:35 PM PDT
by Christian Hertzog
Q. What did the music critic say after he tried to digest The Lord Of The Rings: A Symphony In Six Movements?
A. Orc!
The Lord Of The Rings Symphony is like the food at a Claim Jumper restaurant: It's okay, but nothing special, and there's way too much of it. However, just as diners seem to enjoy the huge portions at Claim Jumper, so too did the Summer Pops audience devour the LOTR Symphony, rapturously applauding an offering that lasted--including intermission--2 hours and 15 minutes.
All this listener could think was: "That was 135 precious minutes of our life we've lost, we did. We wants it back, we wants the precious!"
In short, I hated the elfen thing.
This wasn't your typical Summer Pops audience. It was a large crowd, the largest I've seen this season, and there were plenty of youngsters in the audience, kids who have probably read the trilogy of novels three times already and watched the trilogy of films twenty times. I imagine that with such prepping, the music acted as a trigger to recall various scenes from the LOTR films. The program provided them with titles of scenes, and the Jumbotron screens projected drawings and paintings reminiscent of production design sketches, which provided the audience with visual cues to remind them what happened when this music was used in the movie.
The drawings and paintings accompanying the music reminded me of those awful segments 40 years ago on NET and Captain Kangaroo, where a song or instrumental music would be accompanied by simple ink drawings, which the camera would slowly pan up or down in a lame attempt to make up for the fact that it wasn't animated, and hence, unworthy of your attention.
Check out how this work was announced in the program:
I'm surprised there wasn't a little trademark symbol after "The Lord of the Rings." If you squint really hard below the title, you can make out--why, look, someone actually composed the work!
Seven things I would have rather done instead of
attending the Lord of the Rings Symphony:
1. Alphabetize my porn collection.
2. Wax my nipples.
3. Write all those Thank You notes I've
neglected to send for all my Christmas presents.
4. Go across the street to Comic Con and engage
in intellectually stimulating discussions such as:
Who would win in a fight, Wonder Woman or
Xena Warrior Princess?
5. Iron six shirts (I'm a slow ironer).
6. Repair that old toaster which I've refused to allow
my wife to throw out for three years because I'm
going to fix it one of these days.
7. Make prank phone calls to piercing shops, asking
them if they have Prince Albert in a can.
It's unclear how much of this "symphony" is Howard Shore's, and how much of it is the effort of "Artistic Advisor & Music Editor" John Mauceri. True, Shore is credited with writing and orchestrating all the music to the film, but I wonder if he just turned Mauceri loose on the cues, saying, "Here, throw something together for me."
I like Howard Shore's film music. He's written some outstanding horror film scores that tower above the third-rate Penderecki imitators. Did he deserve Oscars for his Lord of the Rings music? Sure, it's noble, stirring stuff when accompanying images and dialogue. But you can't simply lift the music from the movie and expect it to play well on a concert stage. It's not just Howard Shore's music; this applies to most film music. Very little of it works divorced from its original function, providing emotional illumination to images and words on a theater screen.
That's why composers extract a suite from dramatic music--not just film composers, but ballet and theater composers as well. And let's get this straight--the Lord of the Rings Symphony is not a symphony, it's a suite. It's nothing more than excerpts--far too many of them--from the film score, spliced next to each other, regardless of abstract musical considerations. A symphony is a large-scale piece, usually in four or more movements, which tells a type of story in musical terms. A good symphony doesn't need images or program notes to accompany the music. The sounds themselves are arranged in such a way that nothing else is needed to experience the work. Believe it or not, the music alone can be as entertaining as a movie or a book, and in the case of the great symphonic masterpieces, much more profound.
What distinguishes a symphony from a suite, besides their respective abstract vs. dramatic conceptions, is that transitions are provided in a symphony to move the listener from one idea to the next, and these ideas are later developed, played with, elaborated upon. That's not what happens in the LOTR Symphony--we simply hop around from one musical section to the next, with no musical reason for doing so.
There's plenty of worthwhile musical material in the LOTR soundtrack to provide a resourceful composer with main and secondary themes for a symphony. But I suspect that the reason the LOTR Symphony is just a patchwork quilt of film cues is that there just wasn't enough money to make it worth a Hollywood composer's time to take a year off to construct a solid piece of music that could exist outside of a motion picture. I can think of only one concert-length piece of music derived from a film score, and that is Prokofiev's magnificent cantata from Alexander Nevsky. There are a handful of 20-minute-long suites that work well in the concert hall: Thomson's Louisiana Story, The Plow That Broke the Plains, and The River; Corigliano's The Red Violin, and Three Hallucinations (derived from Altered States); Bernstein's On the Waterfront; Hermann's Psycho Suite. Unfortunately, these are the exceptions, not the rule, and the LOTR Symphony is a textbook example of this rule. Cut down
to a half hour or less, The Lord of the Rings would no doubt be a much more enjoyable work.
Before the concert began, a gentleman walked onstage and informed us how lucky we all were that we would get to the hear the LOTR Symphony in its entirety. The only fortunate people present that I could imagine were those suffering from insomnia, whose restlessness would be cured about 20 minutes into the program.
You have to give the San Diego Symphony credit for playing almost two hours of music that they had never seen before so well. In the past, the Summer Pops orchestra was notorious for having as many substitutes as regulars on stage, but
apparently management has cracked down on this practice, making the recent hires do the Summer Pops shows. That is the audience's good fortune. Now, if only management could find some better music for these talented performers to play.
Marcus Bosch conducted with authority, and did the best he could with the heap of notes Shore and Mauceri threw at him. The San Diego Master Chorale was alternatingly vigorous and tender, dramatic and mysterious. I can't comment on their diction, as I speak neither Elf, Dwarf, nor Orc, but I imagine they had their work cut out for them as well learning the pronunciation of all those foreign languages. The St. Paul's Cathedral Choristers and St. Cecilia Choir were a lovable bunch of urchins, and if at times their intonation and ensemble was sloppy, you have to give them credit for trying.
No such qualifications need apply to the lovely Kaitlyn Lusk, the soprano who took center stage after intermission. It's astounding that she is only 16 years old. She already possesses a full, velvety tone, and moved with ease from a classical style to a pop style (the banal tune "Into the West" that anticlimactically ended the work).
Her stage presence was equally striking, a combination of chasteness and radiance and beauty. I think many of the men in the audience were thinking the same thing: that what we wanted to do to her would be illegal in this state, but hey, Kaitlyn, if you're ever in Nevada, give us a call and we'll come visit! I'd like to see this outwardly innocent maiden turn into a wild party animal in a Comic Con hotel room after she goes crunk, as these shy quiet types are often wont to do.
This time I sat about a few rows back behind the mixing board, right in the center. At first the sound was horribly tinny, particularly with the choruses. The orchestral sound improved as the evening progressed, but the choruses occasionally sounded harsh through the P.A. system.
If you want to encounter a more worthwhile Tolkien experience, visit this link.
www.ifilm.com/ifilmdetail/2461954?htv=12
For a copy of the program, click here.http://www.sandiego.com/articlefiles/814ba855-85b0-49bc-a53f-658a037016b4/programs%2000072.jpg
P.S. As a public service for those of you reading this who might be interested to know what symphonies could possibly be better than watching a movie or reading a book, here's a list to get you started:
Beethoven: No. 5 and 7
Dvorak: the New World
Tchaikovsky: No. 4 and 5
Mendelssohn: Italian
Sibelius: No. 2 and 5
Mahler: No. 1
Mozart: No. 40
If you feel adventurous and want to experience works which try to cram everything but the kitchen sink into an hour or more, try these symphonies:
Mahler: No. 2 and 5
Ives: No. 4
