And... cue the music!
How do you re-create the scores to Hollywood’s best-loved musicals when the sheet music was turned into landfill? Note by note... if you’re soundtrack nerd John Wilson
Once upon a time, there was an 11-year-old Geordie kid who didn’t like sport. So what did he do on wet Saturdays? He watched old movies on television and fell in love with Hollywood musicals.
‘I didn’t know why I liked them but I knew they were significant. Hollywood orchestras had some of the best musicians in the world. And I spent my teenage years as a trainee conductor trying to re-create that sound. At the Royal College of Music, I finally did.’
It was a passion that would take him from the piano bars of London to a landfill in Los Angeles where, to his horror, he discovered that the orchestral scores of the film music he loved had been buried. So began John Wilson’s quest to reconstruct those lost scores.
Now in his forties and appointed this year as principal conductor of the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Wilson has retained his childhood passion for the music and goes on tour once again from today, with his hand-picked orchestra and a 50th-anniversary tribute to Cole Porter. There’s a new album too.
John began playing professionally as a cocktail bar pianist at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel 25 years ago.
Then, in 1994, having recruited a small band of enthusiasts, he got some gigs at Pizza On The Park in Knightsbridge. ‘ I did all the arrangements: Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, arranged for our small orchestra. Then we got a good review and we were off.’
Where to, exactly? ‘Well, the orchestra was getting bigger all the time, doing gigs all over the country, for peanuts. And we were steadily building up repertoire and a library of music.’
Easier said than done. Because the orchestral parts for the musicals of MGM’s ‘golden age’ from the Twenties to the Fifties – such as The Wizard Of Oz, An American In Paris, Singin’ In The Rain and Seven Brides For Seven Brothers – were under a golf course in California.
‘They chucked it all out in 1969,’ he says. ‘Everything from 1927 was used as landfill. I’ve thought of digging it up but it’s just not practical.’
All that remained were the MGM ‘conductor books’, in varying degrees of completeness: for The Wizard Of Oz, there was scant indication for harmony and virtually nothing for instrumentation. Easter Parade and Gigi were all but lost – only a third of each score survived.
The University of Southern California had piano scores for the MGM musicals in its archive and, in 2002, John went out to survey them. He began a process of re-creating the full scores on paper. To do so, he had to listen to the soundtracks, marking down all the orchestral parts. ‘In the end, it was just a sheer slog,’ he says.
‘It’s about ears and patience. Hundreds of hours of careful listening, transcribing and reconstructing, making educated guesses about what the musicians employed by the film studios added spontaneously to their parts when the tapes were rolling.’
In 2003, the John Wilson Orchestra was confident enough to take the financial risk on a concert of music he had reconstructed in London’s Royal Festival Hall. In 2007, Wilson made his Proms debut in the Royal Albert Hall conducting British film music and, two years later, here turned with a programme celebrating MGM musicals. It was watched by 3.5 million people on TV and has been released on DVD. He is now a Proms regular.
Wilson was supported by a fine body of musicians from top orchestras. ‘They love the JWO because it’s full of such good players. And we’ve got a definite style, which is different to Beethoven.’
Irish audiences have seen him conduct the RTÉ Concert Orchestra in a series of highly successful Wizard Of Oz screenings, as well as in screenings of classic song-and-dance routines, Gotta Dance!
Other highlights of John Wilson’s four years as the RTÉCO principal guest conductor give an indication of his range: in 2009, he conducted La Sheridan – A Gala Operatic Tribute to Margaret Burke Sheridan, as well as a show called The John Lennon Songbook with Mark McGann, Curtis Stigers and Claire Martin. In May 2010 he put on a performance of The Great American Songbook with Richard Rodney Bennett and Claire Martin and he conducted My Fair Lady with Anthony Andrews the following August. He’s also conducted Gilbert and Sullivan, classics like Gershwin’s Piano Concerto and a Spanish-themed night.
Wilson’s success proves that the hard work matters. ‘I once spent an entire Sunday re-creating four seconds of music from the cyclone scene in The Wizard Of Oz.’ And he still spends three months a year re-creating scores, though he now has a team to help him.
Wilson’s magic is that he’s a nerd but, of course, there’s more. Put him on a podium and he comes alive, energising everyone and getting a packed hall to swing in a way rarely encountered at orchestral concerts. Why are his gigs so packed? The music of course. ‘Some people heard it first time around and there’s a nostalgia. Most are new to it but they recognise quality when they hear it because this music is cut from such high-grade cloth.’
As well as the JWO, Wilson is building his career as a mainstream symphonic conductor and has an album out of Elgar’s wartime music. ‘Elgar is my favourite composer. And Vaughan Williams’s symphonies stand at the heart of 20th-century English music.’
His biggest moment of all? Taking the JWO to Los Angeles last year. ‘ I was really nervous until somebody took me to peep through a curtain into the hall. There in the front row was the legendary John Williams.’
The fact that the composer for films including Jaws and Indiana Jones was there was just what he needed. ‘I knew then everything would be okay.’