Posted by On May 2nd, 2019 I was pleasantly surprised to receive an offer to join a friend for a concert at the National Arts Centre. The centrepiece of the show was a new guitar concerto commissioned by Alexander Shelley and the NAC Orchestra so of course I jumped all over it.
I noticed that the composer was going to be giving a pre-concert chat so I went a bit early to check it out. I’m not sure if I had actually heard the name Howard Shore before and I tell you, I was shocked when the host started listing off the man’s credits.
Shore launched from his role as the first musical director for Saturday Night Live (he wrote both the intro and outro themes and suggested that John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd call their new act “The Blues Brothers”) into the realm of Big-Time score writing following a triple punch that had him compose the music for Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, Cronenberg’s The Fly, and Penny Marshall’s Big all within about three years.
Then he returned to a couple more Cronenberg movies (Dead Ringers and Naked Lunch – Shore went on to compose music for more than a dozen Cronenberg films), then came Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, Mrs. Doubtfire, and tons more. But he really hit it out of the park (notoriety-wise) when Peter Jackson rang him up and asked him to score the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies (which took him about four years), writing a total of twelve hours of music for a combined choir/orchestra that numbered up to 250 musicians. Seems like when it comes to film scoring this guy is second only to the John Williams.
And here I had never even heard of the guy. Which goes to show how far down the totem pole of fame second place resides, I suppose.
I really enjoyed his thirty-minute chat; I liked that he lived and wrote in the forest (“All my pieces are originally titled “Forest”) and I liked what he learned from his first music teacher (“Keep the pencil moving; that’s the way to compose.”). What I didn’t like so much was his new piece of music, entitled The Forest: Concerto for Guitar and Orchestra.
I was very hopeful when the piece started. Soaring strings punctuated by chipmunk-like oboe squeals filled the room with an instant and unmistakeable soundtrackiness that confirmed the composer’s legacy (not to mention his professed musical connection with nature) and made me pretty excited to be sitting in the room for the debut of this guy’s new work*. Then the guitar parts began.
First off, I’ve never been to a guitar concerto before but I’m pretty sure the audience should have been able to hear the guitar pretty front and centre in their aural canals, and man, could we never**. I quickly started to wonder if young guitarist Miloš Karadaglić knew he was too low in the mix because I could see how hard he seemed to be plunking at everything. I mean the guy seemed to be playing at fortissimo the whole time, and still I was straining to hear him.
(For the record, I was in the sixth row. I must say, I’ve thus far been decidedly unimpressed with the sound in the hall since the recent installation of their new, wood-panelled concert shell.)
But you know, the muted sound was almost a blessing because for the life of me I couldn’t find any connection between the plunky, forced guitar parts and the sweeping pastoral orchestral phrases that were intended to support them. To be honest, partway through the piece I let the guitar fall away from my attention and instead tried to focus on just the orchestral sections, which helped.
In the end, the new guitar piece turned out being the least of the three works performed by the orchestra at this show (the crowd obviously agreed: the standing ovation that followed the piece seemed to be granted very begrudgingly), with Mendelssohn’s Overture in C Major (written not by Felix, but by his sister Fanny) emerging as the clear favourite – in my mind at least (Brahms’ 1st Symphony ironically came in 2nd). Backstage after the show I was pleased to chat with the composer (yes, I did some lying) as well as conductor Alexander Shelley. If I thought for a second I would have gotten a real, candid answer I might have asked Shelley what he thought of the guitar piece. It must be a strange thing to commission a work and have a big-wig composer spend a year of his life producing said work, only to find the results disappointing. What’s a guy to do? I guess just smile and do his best to bring the notes to life, hoping the whole time that he’s wrong.
Not that I’m saying that Alexander Shelley was thinking this the whole time he was conducting the piece…but I am strongly suggesting the possibility that he might have been. To my ears, he should have been.
In short: it was another great night out at the orchestra.
*Did I mention that this was a premiere? Well, it was night two of a two-night premier so I guess the actual premier was on the previous evening. Which made this show not a premier at all I suppose***.
**”Could we never” is meant to be the opposite of “could we ever”. Obviously.
***Oh, nothing.
Todd Man Out 