Music
Christmas at the Movies
City Halls, Glasgow
Keith Bruce
four stars
IN a musical parallel with what happens at dinner tables on Christmas Day – perhaps at exactly the same time as this concert was due to be broadcast on BBC Radio Scotland – the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s movie-music concert is an excuse to pig out on the orchestral stuff that many folk enjoy most. The second half, which included the title theme from Star Wars, a suite from Disney’s Frozen, the celeste-featuring Hedwig’s Theme from Harry Potter and Julian Nott’s right-Northern brass music from Wallace and Gromit, was a rich menu of popular hits, with John Barry’s Out of Africa and – perhaps less predictably – Eric Rogers’ score for Carry On At Your Convenience, arranged by the evening’s conductor, Gavin Sutherland, arguably the tastiest of the music.
Sutherland’s scoring ran through the whole evening, with Brazil – a movie tune that runs from Carmen Miranda to Terry Gilliam – and Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther Theme, particular highlights. His arrangement of Michel Legrand’s Windmills of Your Mind had the historical interest of having been first made for Hannah Gordon to sing on a Morecambe and Wise Christmas special, but was perhaps the least well-suited vocal number for presenter Jamie MacDougall.
His personality is perfect for the event, but his tenor was much better deployed on Mario Lanza’s Be My Love and Irving Berlin’s White Christmas singalong.
With 80 musicians onstage, and as much music for the players to know as would feature in any season concert of “serious” music, this was no mere snack menu but a real feast that covered the history of film scores from Korngold’s Robin Hood through to Full Mayhem from The Incredibles, which was the stand-out number of the first half.
It had been just as carefully sequenced, so that Sutherland’s arrangement of the original Mary Poppins music was followed by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Hushabye Mountain for MacDougall to sing – both composed by those genius melodicists the Sherman Brothers, of course.
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