180821 – Toronto Concert Orchestra

Like the actor that defined his part, this is the music that defined the film or television series: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Phantom of the Opera, Porgy & Bess, Star Wars, West Side Story, Game of Thrones, and many more.

PROGRAMME

Francesco Sartori | Con te partirò
Josh Groban | Evermore from Beauty and the Beast
Leonard Bernstein | Somewhere from West Side Story
John Williams | The Raiders March from Raiders of the Lost Ark
Andrew Lloyd Webber | Selections from Phantom of the Opera
Ramin Djawadi | The Game of Thrones (arr. Gotov)
John Williams | Theme from Schindler’s List (arr. Custer)

[Intermission]

Aram Khachaturian | Adagio from ballet Spartacus
John Williams | Star Wars Medley (arr. Burden)
Max Steiner | Tara’s Theme from Gone with the Wind
Herman Hupfeld | As Time Goes By from Casablanca
John Williams | Harry Potter Music (arr. Brubaker)
Leonard Bernstein | West Side Story (arr. Mason)
John Philip Sousa | The Stars and Stripes Forever (arr. Stokowski)

Approximate Timing | 4.3, 3.2, 3.0, 5.5, 11.5, 4.5, 4.7 [20] 9.1, 8.7, 4.4, 4.5, 11.5, 10.5, 3.5

Conductor | Kerry Stratton

PROGRAMME NOTES

Prepared by TCO's Assistant Conductor, Surinder S. Mundra

There is nothing else that defines the new resplendent age of industrialization, automation, space exploration, and quite frankly that global sensibility and cohesion or oneness of humanity than film. With the ease of transmitting information to the other ends of the world through the air waves, the world has felt all at once larger and more connected, while so minuscule in this vast and ever expanding universe.

Film has brought the world together in a way that no other artistic medium has, and broadened the human imagination in ways that would otherwise seem impossible. Movies and the music that come with them have taken us to other galaxies in Star Wars, while acquainting us with new mythical figures and meta-heroes, in Game of Thrones, or Harry Potter. They have captured and brought to birth stories involving the simplicity and complexity of human relations in small towns or suburbs, like Gone with the Wind, or West Side Story. Yet in film, though we know not what will happen in the end, we most certainly do in movie music.

Assuredly, film scores perfectly reflect society today. This is not to say however that this modern musical form of expression is devoid of any relation to the Baroque, Classical, or Romantic periods. Obviously these periods influenced all contemporary film composers like John Williams, James Horner and the like. We hear Mars, from The Planets, by Gustav Holst in Williams’ Star Wars Fanfare, or the imitative counterpoint 17th century composer and theorist Johann Fux spells out in his Gradus ad Parnassum in the Tara Theme from Gone with the Wind. These film composers share, and utilize all those techniques of the great masters.

History’s greatest classical pioneers have generally always regarded opera as the penultimate form in the echelons of compositional styles. In opera, we are immersed in a shared visual, musical and dramatic experience. Opera brings together the artistry from every discipline. We are taken to other places in their costumes, stage backgrounds, acting, and music. Interestingly, in opera, we are left to our own interpretation and imagination to fill in the pieces as it were, like postmodernist art requires. Paradoxically, modern film recalls the spirit of the realism of Caravaggio, or Michelangelo making it in a way much more traditional than modern.

Thus, it may be said that movie or film art with its accompanying film scores is much more similar to that of the masters in dramatic and music art history than we would think.

"If I weren’t a director, I would be a film composer." Steven Spielberg

SCREEN CLASSICS

Week 12 | Casa Loma Symphony in the Gardens Series