g h E d i n b u r r n a t i o n a l e I n t F i l m F e s t i v a l Sound and vision
After going Back to the Future in 2015, the Edinburgh International Film Festival teams up again with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for a live orchestra screening of ET. Paul Whitelaw
speaks to those tasked with bringing the classic John Williams score to magical life
I t’s a piece of sweet synchronicity worthy of Hollywood itself. This year marks the 70th edition of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and 70th birthday of legendary i lmmaker Steven Spielberg whose planet- conquering classic ET the Extra Terrestrial had its UK premiere at the EIFF in 1982.
How better
to celebrate this coincidence than with the i rst British screening of the i lm accompanied by a live orchestra performing John Williams’ immortal score? ‘A lot of people haven’t seen ET on the big screen for a long time,’ says EIFF artistic director Mark Adams. ‘And I think that music played by a full orchestra in the Festival Theatre gives it a real sense of atmosphere and occasion. It’s a proper i lm event.’ This will mark the second time that the Royal Scottish National Orchestra has collaborated with the EIFF in as many years, following last year’s sold-out screening of Back to the Future. Dutch conductor Ernst van Tiel, who will lead the RSNO this time around, agrees: ‘You cannot compare the concert with live orchestra and going to a cinema. It’s something totally different; the impact is huge.’
No stranger to the world of cinema, van Tiel conducted Ludovic Bource’s celebrated score for the Oscar-winning French sleeper hit, The Artist. He’s also travelled the world conducting orchestras at special screenings of classics such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and has mounted the podium for celebrations of great screen composers such as Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann. Yet despite his admiration for Williams’ work, van Tiel has a confession to make: prior to signing
16 THE LIST 2 Jun–1 Sep 2016
up for this performance, he’d never actually seen ET before. ‘But when I started to study it, I saw the i lm and heard the music, and it was so affecting and so well done. A computer can write music like Mozart, but the only thing missing is that something which you cannot describe. That’s what a good score is, and I think ET is maybe John Williams’ best.’ It’s certainly one of the most well-known and beloved scores in cinema history. You could, of course, say the same about so many Williams scores, from those he wrote for the Superman and Star Wars sagas, to his many collaborations with Spielberg including Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Jaws. ‘He seems to have found that magical link with two or three i lmmakers where they create a sense of majesty and adventure and a spiralling sense of occasion,’ says Adams. ‘You look at Star Wars and Raiders and see that his work is so distinctive; you feel a building sense of excitement when the music kicks in.’
For RSNO chief executive Krishna Thiagarajan, Williams is ‘one of the most inl uential composers of our time’. He also believes that concerts of this kind draw an important link to the origins of cinema itself. ‘It’s only when the movies learned how to talk that the music disappeared from movie theatres,’ he says. ‘But most of the theatres that were built early last century had entire orchestra pits installed as well. So, in a way, we’re doing something that seems modern, but actually 100 years ago was completely normal.’ the early days of live cinema accompaniment, van Tiel waxes lyrical about the art of the sound maker, or geräuschemacher
Recalling
in German: ‘He would make sound effects such as ringing bells and i ring gunshots. Also there was a time when the big cinema organs had everything; they had piano sounds, trumpets and military drums played by very high level musicians.’ Van Tiel believes passionately in the importance of i lm composition, not only as an artform in its own right, but also as a gateway into symphonic music for modern audiences. ‘When I was conducting “Adagio for Strings” by Barber in a university in Holland, almost all the students were suddenly totally quiet and said, “we know this!” They liked it because it had some context with the i lm Platoon. Another example is Walt Disney’s Fantasia, which for many people was their introduction to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” and Bach.’ He also believes that many of those great classical composers, Stravinsky and Wagner in particular, would be working in cinema today. Film composition, he argues, is no longer seen as a lesser artform. ‘In the past, on the high level, there was opera and ballet. They were at the top and i lm music was much less appreciated. But in the last few years it’s almost on the same level, and I’m very happy with that because for me i lm music, opera and ballet are all theatre music. There is lots of good i lm music and I love to conduct it, because what happens in the hall with the i lm and the orchestra is like exploding a bomb. The feeling that we are creating something new at that moment gives such an extra impact to everybody.’
ET the Extra Terrestrial, Festival Theatre, Edinburgh, Sat 25 Jun.