At some point in the last ten-fifteen years, orchestras happened upon a new formula for a cash-cow event: performing the entire score to a movie as the movie itself played on a screen above them. These events have proven very popular, and thus have given orchestras a much needed series of events that draw big crowds.
And yet, as much as I adore film music, I had never attended one of these events…until last week, when The Wife and I went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark at the Buffalo Philharmonic. I bought the tickets several months ago, for The Wife’s birthday in February. We’ve been trying to give events as gifts more over the last few years, and when I started “event shopping”, this was the nearest one that made me go “Oooooh, yeah, that!” So on her birthday on February 25 I got to say, “Happy birthday! I bought tickets to this thing in twelve weeks!”
Luckily, she didn’t mind.
I don’t have much to say about Raiders as a movie, since it’s one of my favorite movies of all time and I know it as well as I like any movie ever made. It did occur to me that this was the first time I’ve seen Raiders on a big screen since it came out in 1981. The movie’s story pulled me in, to the point that at times I actually forgot that the BPO was right there on the stage.
And how did the BPO do? Brilliantly, as a matter of fact. This isn’t surprising, really. The BPO is a terrific orchestra, and they were more than up to the task at hand. Their sound is really suited to the big, lush romantic sounds of John Williams’s score, especially in the showpiece cues like the Map Room sequence and the “basket chase” in Cairo. They really excelled in the extremely technical action music during the airplane fight and the “Desert Chase”, which is one of the most difficult and complex movie action cues ever written. Here the BPO held up amazingly.
The event was an absolute delight, and I’ll be looking for more such concert-filmscore performances to come!
