WHEN ‘HARRY POTTER’ MET HOUSTON
In “Harry Potter and the HalfBlood Prince,” the film series based on J.K. Rowling’s bestselling books continues the dark turn it took in the previous film, in which Harry’s godfather dies at the hands of the resurgent Lord Voldemort. Nicholas Hooper’s orchestral score darkens right along with it.
“The way Hooper uses orchestral colors is really, really interesting to me,” says Constantine Kitsopolous, who will conduct the Houston Symphony for this weekend’s live-to-film “Half-Blood Prince” performances.
“Even in the cues that are fairly rapid-fire rhythmically, there’s still an enormous amount of orchestral variety,” he continues. “That’s what I really look for in a movie score: Is the composer able to accompany the film with a wide variety of orchestra color? How does the composer use the orchestra?”
Although “Half-Blood Prince” has its share of lighter moments, explains Kitsopolous, Hooper relies heavily on the low woodwinds (bassoon, contrabassoon, bass clarinet) and low brass (trombone, tuba) — instruments especially useful in creating a foreboding mood. The more somber tone reflects a newfound gravity to the story lacking in earlier installments: Voldemort’s followers spark mayhem across Britain, while Harry and his friends juggle their studies, Quidditch, budding romances and anxiety about their looming confrontation with the Dark Lord.
In other words, they do a lot of growing up.
“The music reinforces their character,” Kitsopolous says. “If you listen to the music that accompanies Harry, it emphasizes his maturing and gives him kind of a solid underpinning.”
According to Kitsopolous, Hooper’s orchestrations place his “Half-Blood Prince” score in some distinguished company: not only that of John Williams, who scored the Potter series’ first three films, but of Williams’ mentor Bernard Herrmann. Best known for “Taxi Driver” and “Cape Fear” and many Alfred Hitchcock collaborations — among them “Psycho” and “North by Northwest” — the Juilliardtrained Herrmann’s perceptive, unorthodox orchestrations left a lasting imprint on Hollywood.
“Bernard Herrmann was the first guy to use two bass clarinets, as well as the two clarinets, so he used a total of four clarinets and used them very often just the four of them playing together, with nothing else going on,” he says. “Listen to the score to ‘Citizen Kane,’ too — (it’s) the same kind of idea.”
The Houston Symphony Chorus will also be on hand to sing the vocal parts that, explains Kitsopolous, heighten the “medieval” atmosphere exemplified by Hogwarts, the enormous castle/school where the Potter films are primarily set.
“A lot of the time the chorus is singing in kind of harmonic chord clusters,” he says. “They’re very dissonant. There’s kind of a disembodied vocal thing that adds to the eeriness of parts of the score.”
Kitsopolous says good film composers shy away from being too obvious, one reason he admires the Potter scores so much. Another is how closely synced the score can be not just to the characters’ actions but to their emotions, in a way that’s not always so easy to anticipate.
“I’m not a composer, but I would imagine it would be a difficult thing to score movies with stories as complex as the Harry Potter movies, in the sense that you’ve got to be very careful not to be too right on the mark,” he says. “And I think the various composers have been very good at not telegraphing what’s going to happen at any particular moment, but really emphasizing the element of surprise, the drama (and) the emotions of the characters.”
Music director for Florida’s Festival of the Arts BOCA, Kitsopolous is a frequent live-to-film conductor who estimates he’s got around 40 films in his repertoire. He’s done all the Potter films except two: “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2,” which he’s scheduled to conduct next year. That leaves only “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” — “somehow or another I skipped the fifth one,” he laughs.
Live-to-film performances have become a popular (and lucrative) part of the orchestral calendar; the Houston Symphony is scheduled to do both “Return of the Jedi” and “Black Panther” later this season. For Kitsopolous, the experience really hit home a few years ago when he slipped into the audience of one of the “Star Wars” films and let John Williams’ score wash over him.
“It just hits you where it counts,” he says. “It’s just a visceral feeling.”