Videogame music concerts ‘Score’ in Sweden

OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION

10 years of game concerts in Berwaldhallen

 

When Orvar Säfström and the Malmö Symphony Orchestra treated the world record audience at the Malmö Festival to computer and video game music in August 2006, not many people dared to hope that game concerts would become a recurring phenomenon, at least not here in northernmost Europe. But now, 10 years after Berwaldhallen first hosted Säfström’s acclaimed work in popular culture, not many people are raising their eyebrows at a game concert in the Swedish Radio Concert Hall.

 

A buffet of selected treats

 

Appropriately enough for an anniversary concert like this, the program is like a buffet of selected treats from beloved games, from the fast-paced to the finely tuned. While there’s not a single unknown game on the program, it’s not just a list of the most anticipated games either. And the fact that the 100-year-old Radio Choir is finally involved opens up even more possibilities, both in terms of sound and program. The choir is involved throughout the concert program, in almost every piece.

 

Dutch composer Joris de Man will perform music from the Killzone series that made him famous in the 2000s: the theme tune from the third game, with a languorous violin solo, and the first game, with the unpleasantly bombastic march that portrays the series’ antagonists: the warlike Helghan Empire. The Killzone music has been with us since Orvar Säfström’s very first game concert in Malmö in 2006 and was previously a kind of unofficial signature tune for the concerts. The evocative music for Age of Conan by Norwegian game and film composer Knut Avenstroup Haugen is reminiscent of Hans Zimmer’s music from the movie Gladiator, but with a slightly more Scandinavian touch.

 

As in the world of film, TV and theater, some game creators eventually become as famous as their games. Hideo Kojima’s cinematic ambitions are evident in the Metal Gear Solid games: thrilling, cinematic spy thrillers with both huge, bipedal armored vehicles and an underlying anti-war message. It is therefore not surprising that the English film composer Harry Gregson-Williams, among others, has contributed music to several of the games. In the third game’s Bond-inspired theme song, Snake Eater, Sabina Zweiacker demonstrates her stylistic breadth.

 

Bloodborne was directed by Japan’s Hidetaka Miyazaki and inspired by classic horror writers such as Bram Stoker and H.P. Lovecraft. A number of Japanese and American composers, including Ryan Amon and Tsukasa Saitoh, have created the game’s harsh and grandiose music. The suite for choir and orchestra performed here is also completely new and is premiered here in Berwaldhallen.

 

Stylistic range that appeals

 

Unaccustomed listeners of incidental music may be taken aback by the abrupt stylistic shifts in the program. After Nobuo Uematsu’s wistful but determined Terra’s Theme, from one of the most popular games in the beloved Final Fantasy series, the mood changes abruptly in the transition to Garry Schyman’s and Paul Gorman’s terrifying music from Dante’s Inferno: a delightfully grotesque fever dream freely inspired by Dante Alighieri’s epic. Here Dante is a crusader who braves the horrors of hell to save his beloved Beatrice, but in the process risks triggering the final day. The suite from Dante’s Inferno is also performed here for the first time.

 

The second act also takes a sharp turn. Michiru Yamane’s stirring music for Castlevania: Symphony of the Night blends influences from American progressive rock and Italian baroque music. It is yet another arrangement that will have its world premiere here in Berwaldhallen. Via classic Zelda melodies, which will probably get some of the audience humming along, it goes on to the instantly recognizable theme song of the long-running Halo, signed by the radar couple Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori, with a nod to medieval church music. The Berwaldhalle’s first game concert, in September 2007, was about the Halo series and its music.

 

But rather than causing aesthetic whiplash, this stylistic range is one of the attractions for game and game music fans. They flock to hear Koji Kondo’s classic themes from The Legend of Zelda, Kow Otani’s elegiac yet grandiose music for Shadow of the Colossus – also in a newly written arrangement – and not least Jeremy Soules’ musical folk song from the fictional, Nordic-inspired kingdom of Skyrim in the game of the same name: The Dragonborn Comes, which has taken over from Killzone as the signature of Orvar Säfström’s acclaimed concerts. Here, Swedish soprano Sabina Zweiacker sings this time with not only the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra but also, as mentioned, with the Radio Choir.

 

Music that tells a story

 

Outsiders like to dismiss the appeal of a games concert on the grounds that audiences only come to hear music they already know and have a connection to through the games. But such simple and one-dimensional explanations not only miss the point, in a figurative sense, but also the concrete value of the encounter with live music.

 

And why would it be worse to want to hear Danish Jesper Kyd’s bittersweet Ezio’s Family for the third, seventh or tenth time than, for example, a work by his countryman Carl Nielsen? The enduring appeal of game concerts is proof enough that game music, too, both appeals to and speaks to a devoted audience, and that it is an indispensable part of the vast contemporary musical landscape.