The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in concert in Seville – ARTICLE
On Friday, February 28th and on Saturday, March 1st, the Royal Symphony Orchestra of Seville – ROSS and more than 100 voices on stage under the baton of maestro Shih-Hung Young, performed at the FIBES Auditorium in Seville, Spain, the epic soundtrack by Howard Shore for ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring’ live while the film was screened (read more).
Our colleague José Carlos Fernández Moscoso attended the event and offers us this exclusive article for SoundTrackFest.
“The Lord of the Rings” returns to Seville with magnificence two decades later
Film music is composed for the image. Although this statement is an axiom and as such indisputable, the growing and fortunate recognition of film compositions by the film-viewing public and the industry itself has been generating artistic proposals of different natures. Concerts with symphony orchestras, chamber concerts adapting scores, scripted shows with alternating words, and music or projections that accompany the interpretation of the soundtracks in question.
Concerts in traditional format allow the spectator to focus fully on the orchestra, on the texture of the pieces and on the ways in which both the conductor and the musicians interpret a work. The addition of images has come to represent an additional attraction for the public or a gain of spectators likely to respond with a grimace on their face when attending a ‘classical’ concert. Everything that adds up is always positive, especially when it comes to disseminating a genre that is undervalued in film and music. It is enough to remember that in classical Hollywood it cost to start the custom of accrediting musicians or paying them as they deserved, and without going to distant times, the unfair proposals of the thinking minds of important awards such as the Oscars, which relegated to a delayed recording the awarding of the statuette for best soundtrack along with another handful of ‘technical’ sections, although the creation of music is not something ‘technical’ but artistic and creative. They had been proposing it since 2018, managed to make this discrimination effective in 2022 and happily retracted it the following year. But disdain and disregard for film music is always lurking. So, any proposal that attracts followers more than adds, multiplies. And proposing to hear and see doubles the excellence of the offer.
Another thing is that purists like me take to the extreme our defense of the indissoluble concept of music-image, so that the fact that you cannot pay the necessary attention to the orchestra while interpreting – especially in a country unaccustomed to retain two actions in their field of vision since the dubbing was imposed as something ‘natural’ – is added to the interpretation of themes that the only relationship with the image is that they belong to the same film, to give an example, scenes of romantic moments of the film appear on the screen while the musicians offer the score that was written for thrilling scenes of another moment of the film, producing a perceptive mismatch that affects the commandment with which we began this text: film music is composed for the image. But for ‘its’ concrete image.
In all this more or less successful offer has come to burst a more accurate and fairer option with the music: the interpretation of the complete soundtrack of the film along with the full projection of the film, synchronizing both as we know the final product. We continue to distract the full attention required by the musicians, but at least we bring the senses into agreement and satisfy them in their proper measure and moments. And that is what we experienced last February 28 and March 1 in the auditorium of Fibes in Seville with the Real Orquesta Sinfónica de Sevilla – Royal Symphony Orchestra of Seville performing the OST of “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” in a show -in the most majestic sense of the word- sponsored by the management of the ROSS by including in its programming the tour that for several years has starred the soundtrack created by Howard Shore, which has already visited other cities under the baton of maestro Shih-Hung Young and soprano Grace Davidson.
In the two concerts offered in Seville, both the conductor and the soloist demonstrated that they were swimming like fish in water in the world of film music. The Taiwanese conductor already comes from similar live experiences with soundtracks also as celebrated as “The Godfather”, shows with the Disney label or, in the symphonic plenitude similar to the film work of Peter Jackson, the concerts with the soundtracks of several of the films that make up the Harry Potter saga.
Young conducted in Seville with much solvency, without fuss, bringing to the orchestra and the vocal mass a tempo astonishingly similar to that which Howard Shore himself impressed on the London Philharmonic Orchestra when he recorded its soundtrack almost twenty-five years ago. A silver jubilee that will be fulfilled having traveled a road of satisfactions with gifts for Seville. It is worth remembering that what was experienced in the capital of Seville a few days ago was a show of great importance.
The orchestra was joined by four choirs and a young choir, almost reaching the figure of two hundred people on stage. It is not necessary to emphasize the complexity of conducting a concert of this kind, lasting three hours, adjusting to the images of the film projected in real time with the dialogues and what we film music lovers demand the most, together with musical and vocal quality: fidelity and respect for the original work. In this sense, the concerts of February 28 and March 1 exceeded the mark by far. If anything, the occasional license that came to enrich the proposal, such as the inclusion of the accordion in the sequence of the region shortly after the beginning of the film, corresponding to the theme “Concerning Hobbits” in the record edition, and that in the later CD with the extended version did include this instrument as a complement, although in the film it appears as in the original recording for the film. Nothing to object… despite my self-confessed purism.
El mismo que me hizo comenzar el concierto con rostro contrariado al comprobar que el sonido de los cuatro coros estaba amplificado y la microfonía dispuesta no solo alcanzaba a los vocalistas, sino también por proximidad a la orquesta, lo que arrojaba un sonido que restaba naturalidad a la interpretación y, como siempre que un audio se amplifica, merma la percepción auditiva del espectador a la hora de recibir los matices reales de la interpretación. Es entendible que la organización decidiera apoyar el espectáculo sobre ‘ayuda técnica’ dado que estamos hablando de un auditorio con 620 metros cuadrados de escenario y capacidad para más de tres mil personas (con casi todas las localidades vendidas en ambos conciertos).
That is why many of us still miss these events at the Real Teatro de la Maestranza, which 21 years ago hosted a memorable concert in which Howard Shore himself conducted a symphony in six movements that summarized the music composed by the master for “The Fellowship of the Ring”, “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King”. “My music is composed according to Tolkien’s words”, Shore commented to the journalists who attended his press conference as a prelude to (also) the two concerts he conducted in the now defunct Film Music Meetings coordinated by Carlos Colón.
It has taken more than two decades for Seville, in Andalusia, to experience another gift, an event of similar characteristics to that one, although Shore does not conduct, but with the points in favor of a brilliant direction or the voice of Grace Davidson interpreting the female solo parts, of enormous delicacy interspersed in a monumental symphonic work, as well as in the final credits replacing that of Enya in the song “May It Be” without lagging behind the Irish singer. Because it is worth remembering that Davidson, with almost a hundred and a half soundtracks performed throughout her career, was the original soprano for the recording of the score of “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smoug”, second of the continuations of the initial trilogy of “The Lord of the Rings” also directed by Peter Jackson in 2013 and with the music also composed by Howard Shore.
Equally brilliant in both concerts were Giulia Lucrezia Brinckmeier as concertmaster or Antonio Hervás as piccolo soloist alternating with Irish flute, especially in “Concerning Hobbits”, one in D and the other in C for the solos characteristic of hobbits, Hobbiton, etc. or Alfonso Gómez as 2nd flute with the flute in G, for the solos with references to Gollum or the elves of the Forest. Or the impressive tuba of Juan Carlos Pérez Calleja in sequences such as the bridge of Khazad Dum, in the horns with “The Treason of Isengard”, the trumpets in “The Ring Goes South” contributing their sonority to one of the most significant leitmotifs of the soundtrack corresponding to the sequence of the council of creation of the community of the ring, the percussion at its peak, powerful and evil, with the characteristic rhythm of the Nazgûl… And so, we could go on going through flashes of the sections of the orchestra in an extraordinary overall performance.
Also worth mentioning is the conjunction of the choral mass in themes as disparate as the powerful “The Black Ridder” or the magical “Lothlorien”, with special mention for the white voices of the Escolanía de Los Palacios, with the astonishing interventions of the child soloist Miguel Montaño Rosal. Maestro Shore’s score is as grand as it is complex. It is no easy task to create the symbiosis experienced in Fibes between a group of small non-professionals with the brilliant voices of the rest of the choirs and the ROSS, although the collaborations of the children’s choir with this orchestra are common.
In short, two concerts for lucky people of all ages, who enjoyed three hours with a 15-minute break, which is a show of great quality and quantity of time, with the capacity practically full and which clearly demonstrates that film music -amplified or not on stage- is synonymous with success and that there is still a long way to go before private and especially public administrations. Administrations that, when it comes to generating culture in their communities or municipalities, show a blushing disinterest not only in film music, but not even in knowing about the existence of these artistic proposals that create culture with capital letters and satisfy the audiovisual demand of thousands of people to whom we have to continue adding more addicts. With or without screenings.
Now we can only wait for the ROSS to have the same great idea and delight us with the experience of “The Two Towers”, which has already been seen with other orchestras and under the same baton of Shih-Hung Young in several Spanish cities.
Article by José Carlos Fernández Moscoso
Pictures by José Carlos Fernández Moscoso & ROSS (Marina Casanova)
