CARDIFF PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA: A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES | LIVE REVIEW
St David’s Hall, Cardiff, Fri 9 Dec
Cardiff Philharmonic have been promoting this evening with a hastily arranged poster and some cherishably naff photos of conductor (and CPO co-founder) Michael Bell fending off a light sabre-waving Darth Vader with his baton. Such japery. This is all in aid of the ‘Welsh Premiere’ of a selection of pieces from Star Wars VII: The Force Awakens which takes up a good portion of tonight’s performance.
For a non-professional orchestra, the cohesion and overall performance is outstanding. Led by Jill Francis-Williams, the audience are treated to some of the most famous pieces from blockbuster movies spanning the last 60 or so years. The acoustics, as ever at St David’s Hall, are superb and each section of the orchestra is put to the test for the rousing opener of John Williams’ Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Williams’ work features heavily in tonight’s staging which is very loosely based on the theme of Heroes and Villains.
The string section is brought to the fore for a short suite of music from Psycho composed by Bernard Herrmann, which is beautifully done. The short stabs (pun intended) of the infamous shower scene are worryingly met with laughter from the audience – not quite sure if that’s what Messrs Hitchcock and Herrmann were intending. Before music from each movie is played, Michael Bell gives us some short background to the upcoming pieces which are both light-hearted and informative: he’s been doing this for well over 30 years now and knows exactly how to entertain the audience both facing them and with his back to them.
Despite appearances from Hollywood blockbusters such as Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (Aunt Marge’s Waltz) and the aforementioned Star Wars suite, there are also excellent renditions of Elmer Bernstein’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Ron Goodwin’s Where Eagles Dare, the latter producing the performance of the evening from the very accomplished percussion section. We must thank that man John Williams again for the highlight of the evening which is a perfectly executed delivery of the Superman opening titles, which closes the show before a deserved encore of Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. CPO have been plugging away at these movie scores for many years and it shows in what was an almost faultless performance.
words BEN GALLIVAN