Film Symphony Orchestra – TOON STORY Tour – Valencia – November 2025 [Concert Summary]

The Film Symphony Orchestra (www.filmsymphony.es) conducted by Constantino Martínez-Orts, performed in November in Valencia, Spain, offering one of its many concerts planned within the tour 2025-2026: “Toon Story”.

 

Our colleague Frederic Torres attended the concert and leaves us a great summary exclusively for SoundTrackFest.

 

TOON STORY. FILM SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA conducted by Constantino Martínez-Orts. Valencia Conference and Exhibition Center. November 9, 2025.

Autumn arrives and the FSO begins its new season with a new tour proposed by its director, Constantino Martínez-Orts, CEO and principal conductor of this orchestra, who is also responsible for selecting the program, which on this occasion is defined by music dedicated to animated films. Abandoning for the moment Zen concepts cloaked in a transcendent aura (Henko and Tarab), which he had recently favored as an explanation/justification for the choice and direction of his latest programmed titles, on this occasion Martínez-Orts is opting for a project that is almost guaranteed to be a success and which, strangely, he had not undertaken before, namely dedicating a monographic program to animated films for the big screen (although there is also room for some well-known television references).

 

It is true that he had occasionally included some iconic song in his previous tours, but the genre has experienced such a boom since Disney committed to animated musicals in the late 1980s/early 1990s, with Alan Menken as the main architect (and winner of multiple Oscars), who was joined by composers such as Hans Zimmer, as well as the subsequent and successive emergence of Pixar (which would end up becoming part of Disney itself), and Dreamworks, so it was almost incomprehensible that the FSO had not conceived a concert-show in such fertile ground as the present.

 

The result is once again a hit with family audiences, comprising an entire generation that has grown up watching these films, accompanied by their parents and even relatives from previous generations, such as grandparents, who have also enjoyed these productions that kept their little ones so happy and absorbed in front of the big screen and the small screen, now available on video, DVD, and Blu-Ray.

 

Cell phones were burning as they recorded the suite from the favorite piece, and enthusiasm overflowed among the transgenerational audience, who celebrated each new piece with genuine delight, dispelling Martínez-Orts’ initial concern about having to return to the Valencia Conference and Exhibition Center, which, it should be remembered, is not a concert hall, which is why the sound is so different from that offered by the Palau de la Música, the FSO’s preferred venue, whose problems due to water leaks and the resulting renovations forced it to close, with the consequent relocation.

 

The concert program was as follows:

 

Be that as it may, and with a full house, after the orchestra had been arranged in a staggered formation in the peculiar manner allowed by the stage of the Conference Center, causing a certain “crowding” of the ensemble, which was surely uncomfortable for the musicians but allowed the audience a complete view of the orchestra and a chance to watch the solos of each member, at 18:30h, the show began on that Sunday, November 9, with the first suite of the evening, from the end credits (“Incredits”) of The Incredibles (2004), the celebrated score that put Michael Giacchino in the top tier of Hollywood composers.

 

Martínez-Orts recalled, in the first of his many educational presentations, in which, as usual, he explains and contextualizes what is about to be heard, how the then unknown composer was asked to write music for this superhero family, emulating Marvel’s Fantastic Four, reminiscent of the James Bond and Mission: Impossible franchise films, all sprinkled with jazzy and dynamic touches, which is exactly what Giacchino offered, while remaining true to his own personality. It was a magnificent introduction to set the pace and tone of the show, which was full of the characteristic and colorful lights that accompanied the rhythm and choreography of all the performances by the well-known orchestra.

 

Martínez-Orts then proceeded to explain (somewhat hastily) the importance of the Newman saga in the history of American film music, given that the next suite, consisting of two themes, “Walking Through,” and “Baby’s Wild Ride,” was composed by David Newman, Thomas’s older brother and therefore the son of the great Alfred Newman, who holds the record for having won no less than nine Oscars in the different categories in which he was eligible to compete (many of them for best adaptation of musicals, of which he was not the author). In the suite, from the film Ice Age (2002), a group of animals consisting of a mammoth (Manfred, nicknamed “Manny”), a sloth (Sid), and a saber-toothed tiger (Diego) save a small baby from a fatal fate in the middle of the ice age, all with the help (as a prologue and coda) of the squirrel Scrat.

 

As a counterpoint to this energetic display, the conductor, who manages the timing of his show to perfection (experience counts in this case), then offered the theme “Oogway Ascends,” with music by Hans Zimmer and John Powell, from Kung Fu Panda (2008), where concertmaster Amanda Ochoa‘s violin solo shone, offering a peculiarly oriental sound that referred directly to the Chinese origin of the protagonist. This was followed by a return to Danny Elfman’s energetic score for The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), a stop-motion film that has become a classic, as have its music and songs (“What’s This?”), which Martínez-Orts combined seamlessly with the complicity of singer Víctor Márquez.

 

A new turning point in the form of a romantic ballad came with the Oscar-nominated song “Journey to the Past,” written by Stephen Flaherty for Anastasia (1997), the musical film directed by veteran Don Bluth, which told the story of the only survivor of the Tsar’s family after the assault on the Winter Palace perpetrated during the Soviet revolution by the Bolsheviks, who became a forgetful teenager on her way to Paris. This story gave David Newman the opportunity to earn his only Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, in the category that existed in the 1990s for Best Comedy or Musical, and which on this occasion, disregarded by Martínez-Orts in favor of the song, was performed in Spanish by the usual Anaís Sancruz (in Madrid, Judit Uris is usually the female performer of all the songs).

 

The overflowing vitality of Celtic roots provided by John Powell for the music of How to Train Your Dragon (2010), for which he also earned a well-deserved Oscar nomination for Best Original Score (and which was also mistakenly attributed to Harry Gregson-Williams in the virtual program), continued to delight the audience as the first part of the program drew to a close.

 

The Aladdin suite (1992), the first of several scores by Oscar-winning Alan Menken that could be heard during the concert, which once again combined a song (“A Whole New World”), performed jointly by Sancruz and Márquez, with exotic music with oriental touches and influences. This was the prelude to the most classic of the evening’s scores, the suite entitled Tom & Jerry at MGM, by the great Scott Bradley, whom Martínez-Orts described as a pioneering master, especially in the use of mickeymousing (a technique that consists of imitating the movements, falls, collisions, explosions, etc., of the protagonists). The orchestra offered us a short suite dedicated to this pair, made up of the most famous cat and mouse in animated cinema, with music that, despite having been composed in the 1940s for the classic shorts of two animation greats, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, sounded fresh and entertaining, thanks in part to the gags that the percussion section brought to life in front of the enthusiastic audience, using fictitious blows, breaking plates, and games (hide and seek), among other tricks.

 

After the intermission, the usual raffle (via mobile phone) was held to win a trip for two to Hollywood by correctly identifying ten well-known soundtracks, in this case from animated films, briefly performed by the FSO, before getting down to business with Chicken Run (2000). A brilliant film from the British studio Aardman, in collaboration with DreamWorks, with music by Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell that directly references the great World War II films, with The Great Escape (1963), with music by Elmer Bernstein, as the ultimate reference. The march composed by Gregson-Williams and Powell is catchy, as well as distilling humorous touches thanks to the use of the kazoo, a wind instrument that sounds similar to a kind of party horn, giving it that peculiar and fun tone.

 

In contrast, jazz is the fundamental vehicle for the well-known song “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from one of the great animated hits of the 1990s (specifically, 1995), the revolutionary Toy Story (as Pixar used 3D design for the animation), composed by Randy Newman. On the other hand, the performance of the theme “The Legend of Ashitaka,” from the great Ghibli Studios hit Princess Mononoke (1997), was more orchestral. with music by the usual and sublime Joe Hisaishi, probably the most universal Japanese composer in the field of film thanks to his collaboration with Hayao Miyazaki, director of this film and a dozen others that are much loved and recognized by Western audiences.

Then, a suite was played from the main themes of Shrek (2001), with music once again by Harry Gregson-Williams, who nevertheless had to contend with some well-known pre-existing songs in the film, before tackling the final stretch with three of the great Disney productions of the 1990s. The first was Pocahontas (1995), with music by Menken, which also featured the inevitable “Colors in the Wind,” also winner of the Oscar for Best Song, performed by Sancruz. Next came The Lion King (1994), by Zimmer, a score that broke many molds at the time, following the standardization that was being observed in the products of Media Ventures, as the studios of the famous German composer were then called, and from which Martínez-Orts refrained from offering any songs, perhaps aware of the impossibility of rivaling the musical that is still playing in Madrid. Finally, the suite dedicated to the cinematic gem Beauty and the Beast (1991), which was the first animated film to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Picture, and which again won two Oscars for Menken, for Best Score and Best Song, also featured in the show and performed once again with lyricism by Sancruz and Márquez.

 

The audience’s applause was rewarded with an encore, the theme song from the long-running and well-known television series The Simpsons (which began airing in 1989), composed by Danny Elfman, in which Martínez-Orts encouraged the audience to sing along to the title of this popular family. The party ended with the FSO saying goodbye in its usual way, by sections, although instead of using Williams’ famous music for the “Cantina Band” sequence from Star Wars (1977), it performed an instrumental version of “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” as a novelty, although the musicians’ greetings were more or less the same as usual.

 

The finale of the concert were the photos that the audience could take before and after (with Martínez-Orts), at the photocall set up in the spacious lobby of the Palacio de Congresos, with various popular characters from animated films in costume (Alice, the wolf grandmother, as well as some superheroes, such as some from The Incredibles, or a “gray” Spider-woman), a photocall that was quicker than usual as it was a Sunday and the show ended around 21:00h.

 

A tour that has only just begun and is eagerly awaited by many cities throughout Spain. It will return to Valencia in February, although this time it will be at the Palau de la Música, with a sound more in line with Martínez-Orts’ intentions. Many pieces remain untouched, which is inevitable in such a vast field, where Spanish composers who could easily have been included in this program are once again conspicuous by their absence, such as Arturo Cardelús and his Dragonkeeper (Guardiana de Dragones) (2024), a successful Spanish film whose music was rightly nominated for a Goya in 2024, or the no less sublime Mariposas Negras (2024), a delicate and fascinating score by Diego Navarro from Tenerife. It was not to be. One of these days, perhaps…

 

Article by Frederic Torres

Pictures by FSO and Frederic Torres