`AT THE MOVIES'
Musicians return to the stage for concert season finale
Walking into the Center for the Visual & Performing Arts at Mendocino College on a Wednesday night, the halls echo with the sounds of strings, wind and brass instruments bringing the music of Howard Shore's film scores to life.
It's the Ukiah Symphony Orchestra rehearsal, with one week to go before the final concert of the season — “At The Movies.”
Though rehearsals for the concert began at the end of March, the music for the finale has been a long time coming. Original hopes for the performance of iconic film scores were previously set for February.
With COVID-19 limitations still at play at the time, the orchestra's spring production was instead focused on featuring community musicians and classical repertoire.
This May, the Center Theatre looks alive and revitalized, with the acoustic orchestra shell standing as the backdrop behind a full stage of musicians.
“Yesterday, we set up the stage and it was just shocking to see so many chairs and stands and percussion equipment and risers,” Music Director Phillip Lenberg comments.
The Ukiah Symphony Orchestra began the concert season with a 20-person stage limit, rising to the challenge with an intimate performance of works composed by Gustav Mahler. The subsequent December concert featured 25 string players with a very limited live audience.
The spring concert in February was the smallest of the season, with around 15 local musicians and again, a limited live audience.
As the symphony arrives at the finale, unrestricted and invigorated, there are nearly 50 chairs set up on stage — arranged for four percussion players, nine wind players, 11 brass players and 25 string players.
Though the symphony has musically grown over the season, with their résumé now including Mahler, Tansman, Salieri and Mozart, Lenberg believes that the orchestra has primarily grown in spirit.
“We took the time during COVID to refocus who we are as a community orchestra, what does that mean and how do we serve the community,” Lenberg explains. “There's a commitment to making the music as good as we can.”
With an “At The Movies” concert theme, the film scores being featured have provided the musicians with a new test of skill and dedication to their craft.
When film scores are recorded, it's often elite L.A. musicians who are brought to the studio to sight read and record the music in a single session.
In both creating and performing the music, the composer and musicians are tied to the visuals of the film. The composers paint the soundscape to elicit emotional responses from audiences, such as increasing tension in a scene. The musicians follow the scene on a screen as they play, matching the feeling of the music to the visual elements of the film.
“Without the visuals, you inherently experience the sound of the music instead of it being a soundtrack to something else. It forces you to remove a layer,” Lenberg says.
While traditional classical music is more about the structure and the art, film scores are about raw emotion and making audiences feel a certain way.
“Classical music is often narrative and tells a story. You go up and down like a rollercoaster, but film music is not like that, just because of the nature of the way it was written,” Lenberg says. “It's a collection of short stories, rather than a novel.”
Each of the film scores included in the first half of the concert are concise medleys of the greater film soundtrack — the movies and TV shows featured include The Mandalorian, Superman, Wonder Woman, Black Panther, Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean.
While five of them involve the full orchestra, the Black Panther soundtrack is more selective with only strings and percussion.
Ludwig Goransson is the young Swedish composer who wrote both the Black Panther and Mandalorian themes. Goransson has been known to use a mixture of electronic music and uncommon sounds to create a foreign, exotic sound for his compositions.
On the other hand, Shore's famous composition for Lord of the Rings is very symphonic. Scene notes are even written into the film score itself, cueing the musicians to picture what's taking place in the movie — “hunting for mushrooms” is one example.
The latter half of the concert takes on a more serious tone than the fun, yet dynamic film scores in the first half.
The orchestra will be performing Lenberg's arrangement of a work written by a Ukrainian composer, Reinhold Glière, in response to recent world events.
“As musicians, what we can do is perform music by composers to show our support and solidarity with,” Lenberg says. “Otherwise, I feel as if we would be tone deaf to what's going on in the world.”
Finally, the concert will end with an intense piece by a Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius. The five-movement piece, titled the “King Christian Suite,” was originally written for a play and fits neatly into the theatrical music theme of the concert.
Sibelius is widely known as a symphonic writer, but this particular piece was written before he even composed his first symphony.
“The Sibelius is really virtuosic, it's an exploration of what's going on. The second movement is slow and somber, the third movement focuses on the woodwinds,” Lenberg says. “The last movement is fast and furious, you'll see smoke coming out of the violins.”
Each section of the orchestra is given a showpiece of sorts throughout the journey of the composition, with each movement focusing on a different group of musicians — more than fitting for a showstopping finale performance.
Tickets for the concert are available for purchase at ukiahsymphony.org, as well as at the Mendocino Book Company. Saturday's concert begins at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday's concert begins at 2 p.m. The Sunday symphony performance will be recorded and available for remote viewing at a later date.