Touching film score by Musica

A POIGNANT screening of the 1916 film Battle of the Somme, in Huddersfield Town Hall on Thursday, March 23, will have a live soundtrack performed by some of the Kirklees area’s most talented young musicians.

The unique concert, to be performed by the Musica Youth Orchestra and conducted by Thom Meredith, will also feature a talk by the composer of the orchestral score, Laura Rossi, and, it is hoped, an introduction by the senior curator of the Imperial War Museums Dr Toby Haggith.

Part of a year-long programme of events by the Imperial War Museums and Somme100 FILM (an international project to mark the centenary of the famous WWI battle in 2016), the performance and screening start at 7.30pm.

Tickets are £8 (free for under 18s) from tickets.kirklees.gov.uk or 01484 225755. All proceeds are being donated to the Mayor of Kirklees’ charity, the Royal British Legion.

The organisers of the concert have been researching the stories of soldiers from our area who fought in the Battle of the Somme, and plan to produce a Powerpoint presentation with images and details of the servicemen.

Somme 100FILM began staging concerts back in July 2016 with the aim of finding 100 orchestras worldwide to play the live soundtrack. It has been performed all over the UK and France and as far afield as Canada and New Zealand. The original film by Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell remains one of the most successful British films ever made – an estimated 2m tickets to see it were sold in the first two months after its release. It gave audiences unprecedented access to the true horrors of trench warfare, controversially including the depiction of dead and wounded combatants.