A disappointing concert
Nov. 9th, 2025 09:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverYesterday, my husband and I went to a concert -- the first one since before COVID, actually -- and, unfortunately, it really wasn't good.
I got an email from our local symphony saying that it was putting on a concert called "John Williams and the Music of the Cosmos", conducted by its new director, who started only a month ago. Normally I wouldn't have bothered with this -- I do love John Williams' music but figured it would be focused on Star Wars and can listen to that music any time -- but I checked the announcement and it listed Doctor Who, and I will always do what I can to support spreading Murray Gold's (and Segun Akinola's, if that's the music that's chosen) work on this side of the pond. So, I convinced my husband to go (he has little interest in symphonic music) and bought tickets, and the concert was yesterday.
The program lists pieces from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and in fact started with Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is really the only way to start a concert about space), suites and medleys from Ad Astra, Alien, Interstellar, and Guardians of the Galaxy, the main theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, "I Am the Doctor" (which is what I expected they would play from DW), and excerpts from Star Wars Suite and Star Trek Suite.
Now, I want to state up front that the performance itself was great. The local symphony is very good and the musicians did a great job.
What I didn't like about the concert can be broken into two parts: the arrangement and the interpretation of the music, and the new conductor himself.
Arrangement and interpretation
An "arrangement" of music is how it's put together, both in terms of what you might include as well as what instruments you use. As an example, each Doctor Who theme for the different Doctors are different arrangements of the main "oo-wee-oo" melody. The original Delia Derbyshire version was an electronic version produced by hand, but by the time we get to the later classical Doctors, it's performed on electronic instruments. Murray Gold's arrangements are all orchestral with added electronic instruments, but his versions for Nine, Ten (series 4), Eleven, Twelve, and Fifteen are recognizably different. Segun Akinola returned to more electronic music with Thirteen. And across all of these versions, some of them included the middle eight (that part in the middle where the melody changes) and some of them didn't.
Looking at the music list, three of the pieces were exactly as written by the original composer: Also Sprach Zarathustra, another piece from 2001 called Gayane's Adagio written by Aram Khachaturian, and the theme from Close Encounters. Other than "I am the Doctor" (which I'll talk about later), the rest were all suites or medleys, which are two different ways of playing multiple songs as part of one piece. For example, the Interstellar Suite was one piece of music with a number of different songs from Interstellar.
Since I'm not really familiar with the music from most of the movies here, I can't really comment on the arrangements of their suites, but the Star Trek and Star Wars suites were really strange. First, I noticed that the program listed them both as "excerpts" from the two suites, which is odd: that implies that someone wrote suites of music from both movies, and then someone else took bits and pieces out of those suites to make the arrangements we heard, rather than taking the music from the movies themselves. Why would anyone do that?
The orchestra played the ST one first, and it started with the theme from the first movie, which was also used for Star Trek: The Next Generation. After that, it played another piece from the first movie, and then replayed the movie/ST:TNG theme, and then ended. I thought, that was really strange, because usually medley pieces like this usually play at least four different melodies, whereas this one was only two. Medleys may repeat the opening melody, in order to bring the piece to closure, but this one felt odd because there was little else in the piece.
As an example, there's a concert band arrangement of DW music, and it starts with the DW theme (Eleven's version) and then goes through (not listed in order), "The Doctor's Theme", "Rose's Theme", "Martha's Theme", "The Cybermen", "The Dark and Endless Dalek Night", and "I Am the Doctor", giving the audience a good sampling of the show's music. When my low-level band played it, we found "I Am the Doctor" (which was the last in the medley) too difficult, so the conductor replaced it with a reprise of the DW theme, and this was fine because there was so many other songs between the opening and the repeat at the end.
So anyway, the ST medley was short, only included two songs, and was repetitive. It also felt, to me, a little disrespectful, as the concert was supposed to be a showcase of science fiction music and ST, one of the two biggest sci-fi IPs, got such a tiny part. Both the Interstellar and Guardians of the Galaxy pieces felt much longer and more skillfully arranged.
The SW one was the showcase of the concert, so it was near the end, and it was weird in a different way. It was arranged in four movements, meaning four pieces that are separated by a short pause (as opposed to a medley, which have multiple pieces that move directly to the next without stopping).
The first movement was the main SW theme, Leia's theme, and one other very recognizable SW melody that I can't remember the name of. The fourth movement was the medal ceremony music, the main SW theme, and Leia's theme. The thing is, for both of these movements, they began with playing through one iteration of the melody (the SW main theme for the first, the medal ceremony for the fourth), and then, the rest of both movements were this weird montage of songs, for example, four measures of Leia's theme, then two measures of the SW main theme, then a bit more of Leia's theme, then four measures of the recognizable melody that I couldn't name, etc.
I could see an interesting music theory point to it, that the different melodies in the movie seem very disparate but they do all fit together in a way, but as a listener, I didn't enjoy it, because I couldn't sit back and just listen to these great songs -- one would start and switch to a different song partway through the phrase. I think it would have been cool if they had played the SW main theme, then Leia's theme, then the song I don't know the name of, and then played a section that cleverly combined all three together, so that we got to hear all three musical statements fully and then how they fit with each other, but we never got to hear more than fragments of Leia's theme or the other song.
And then repeating that style of jumble again for the fourth movement just really left a bad taste in my mouth. (Bad sound in my ear? Bad metaphor.)
The third movement was music that I didn't recognize, so I figure it was from one of the newer movies, which I have never seen and will never see. :P
But the second movement was "The Imperial March", pretty much just like the original from beginning to end. So this time, the arrangement was fine. However, the interpretation...
"Interpretation" means how the conductor chooses to have the orchestra play the music. One conductor might take a song and decide to play it soft, light, and jaunty, while another might slow it down a bit and make it more moody. There's a lot of things that a conductor can change to make the music come out the way he wants, such as how loud or how soft, how smoothly or how separated the notes are played, etc.
In this particular case, the conductor chose to play "The Imperial March" at march tempo, which the phrase for playing it at two beats per second, which is the timing of military marching footsteps. Think of any Sousa march ("The Stars and Stripes Forever", or "The Washington Post March", for example), and then think of "The Imperial March" at the same speed. It's too fast.
"The Imperial March" is Darth Vader, the big evil baddie in the black helmet and cape, making his big entrance, striding in as if he owns the place, because he does. The music is supposed to be stately and menacing. Speeding it up to military march tempo almost made it comical.
But you might have noticed that I haven't talked about "I Am the Doctor", and that's because it was the biggest disappointment. Honestly, with what they did to that piece, they just shouldn't have bothered including it.
When you think about that song, you probably hear the most repeated part in the show, played whenever Eleven is about to win the day. You know, "doot doot doot, de doot doot dooo..." But though that's the most iconic part of the piece, it's only one of many parts. There are something like five or six different musical statements throughout the whole piece, and the playtime of the piece on the soundtrack (depending on the performance) is four to five minutes.
The thing that the orchestra played was less than 1.5 minutes long, and did NOT include the most iconic part Moreover, the conductor's interpretation of the music was akin to a ballad, with lilting strings and none of the energy that the Eleventh Doctor embodied. Obviously, neither the conductor nor the person who arranged that piece of music knew nothing about the show or how the music was used.
When it ended, my husband and I kind of looked at each other dumbfounded, and then clapped not because we enjoyed it, but because it was DW and we felt we had to.
The conductor
Despite the two-page-long essay above, though, the greater disappointment in the concert was due to the conductor, for many reasons.
First, you know how symphony conductors usually wear a tux or tails, or if it's a casual concert, they're in a dark tailored suit? Not this guy. He was wearing this floppy baggy shirt, bright white with some kind of black swirl or flower print. And like other symphony conductors, he moved around a lot, swinging his arms and gesturing in huge motions. But, with the white shirt flapping all over the place, against a background of his orchestra all dressed in formal black, he was a huge visual distraction. My husband actually closed his eyes to be able to listen to the music, because the conductor distracting him if he kept his eyes open.
But, what was worse was what the conductor did between the pieces. This was a casual concert intended to celebrate sci-fi movie music, and as such, the conductor spoke to the audience between the pieces to talk about them. (This often doesn't happen for more formal concerts, where the spoken part is limited to announcing what the next piece will be.) Thing is, the conductor didn't actually talk about them. Instead, he made jokes.
For most of the pieces, he gave a fictional biography of the composer or a fictional explanation of the movie. For example, the composer of the music for Ad Astra, who is a modern person, he started by saying, "He was born in 1794..." For Star Wars, he said, "As we all know, the movie follows a boy growing up in a village in Vermont..." so that he could end it with the joke, "and thus caused Hayden Christiansen to decide to become an actor, a decision that we have all regretted since." (The joke is that people have generally disliked the modern SW movies and Anakin in particular, so we all regret that Hayden Christiansen became an actor and played Anakin.) For Doctor Who, he told a story about how some BBC people heard the Thompson Twins song "Doctor, Doctor" in a pub and the idea for a new TV show popped into their heads.
I mean, they're not even good jokes.
The worst was his spiel for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At two times during the concert, he talked about how music always really moved him because music is the one thing that connects people to each other. So, considering that Close Encounters is entirely about aliens attempting to communicate with humans using music, using a sequence of five notes that's repeated in both the movie and in the piece that they played, do you think that that's what he talked about? Of course not. He made a joke that Steven Spielberg and John Williams used to play hockey together when they were kids -- "he shoots, he scores". Which I will admit, was a clever joke and yes, I did laugh, as did most of the audience. But then, he pretended that someone in the front row didn't get the joke and then proceeded to explain at length why it was funny.
You'd think that if music connecting people was a big deal to him, he'd jump on the opportunity to talk about how it was a major theme in the movie he's talking about. But no, he decided to go with a joke.
The thing is, I said that he did this for "most" of the pieces. For Khachaturian's "Gayane's Adagio" that was used in "2001", he told the story of the ballet that the song is from, what happens in the ballet (in the Soviet Union, a woman finds out that her husband is a traitor to the state and turns him in), and the reasons why Khachaturian wrote the ballet (as a subtle form of protest in the guise of state-aligned ideology). However, he'd told fictional tales about all of the other pieces, so we didn't know if we should believe what he was saying about this one. I had to go look it up to find out if it was true. (It was.)
There was one other thing he said that I thought was very telling. Just before the Star Wars suite, he said, "I'm really grateful I had the opportunity to work with the orchestra to get familiar with this music over the past month." Really? Before this month, you weren't familiar with the Star Wars Main Theme or The Imperial March? How does anyone nowadays not know these pieces? I can understand people not knowing any of the others, but the SW Main Theme has been one of the most recognizable pieces of movie music for almost fifty years now, and John Williams is a household name.
But then it clicked. He doesn't watch movies and only listens to and performs a narrow range of musical genres, so he doesn't know these SW pieces, even though they're iconic and ubiquitous. This suggests that he doesn't know anything about the films represented in this concert, and there were too many for him to actually go watch and see how the music was used in them. That's why he made up funny composer biographies and movie summaries: he didn't know enough about them to be able to talk about them with any authority. That's why his interpretations of "The Imperial March" and "I Am the Doctor" felt so wrong. And that's why he missed his opportunity to use Close Encounters to make his personal point.
My husband and I have been talking about the concert, and we came to the additional conclusion that he's an attention whore. His monologues felt like comedy routines intended to demonstrate how clever he is, rather than education for the audience about the music and the movies or any attempts to put the spotlight on the musicians. And we think his bright white flappy shirt was meant to draw the eye to him, away from his musicians (though that intention was probably subconscious).
Anyway, we both decided independently that we won't be attending any more concerts where he's the conductor, which is really sad. I think our local symphony is pretty good, and I loved the previous conductor. Who knows how long this new conductor is going to stay?
I got an email from our local symphony saying that it was putting on a concert called "John Williams and the Music of the Cosmos", conducted by its new director, who started only a month ago. Normally I wouldn't have bothered with this -- I do love John Williams' music but figured it would be focused on Star Wars and can listen to that music any time -- but I checked the announcement and it listed Doctor Who, and I will always do what I can to support spreading Murray Gold's (and Segun Akinola's, if that's the music that's chosen) work on this side of the pond. So, I convinced my husband to go (he has little interest in symphonic music) and bought tickets, and the concert was yesterday.
The program lists pieces from 2001: A Space Odyssey (and in fact started with Also Sprach Zarathustra, which is really the only way to start a concert about space), suites and medleys from Ad Astra, Alien, Interstellar, and Guardians of the Galaxy, the main theme from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, "I Am the Doctor" (which is what I expected they would play from DW), and excerpts from Star Wars Suite and Star Trek Suite.
Now, I want to state up front that the performance itself was great. The local symphony is very good and the musicians did a great job.
What I didn't like about the concert can be broken into two parts: the arrangement and the interpretation of the music, and the new conductor himself.
Arrangement and interpretation
An "arrangement" of music is how it's put together, both in terms of what you might include as well as what instruments you use. As an example, each Doctor Who theme for the different Doctors are different arrangements of the main "oo-wee-oo" melody. The original Delia Derbyshire version was an electronic version produced by hand, but by the time we get to the later classical Doctors, it's performed on electronic instruments. Murray Gold's arrangements are all orchestral with added electronic instruments, but his versions for Nine, Ten (series 4), Eleven, Twelve, and Fifteen are recognizably different. Segun Akinola returned to more electronic music with Thirteen. And across all of these versions, some of them included the middle eight (that part in the middle where the melody changes) and some of them didn't.
Looking at the music list, three of the pieces were exactly as written by the original composer: Also Sprach Zarathustra, another piece from 2001 called Gayane's Adagio written by Aram Khachaturian, and the theme from Close Encounters. Other than "I am the Doctor" (which I'll talk about later), the rest were all suites or medleys, which are two different ways of playing multiple songs as part of one piece. For example, the Interstellar Suite was one piece of music with a number of different songs from Interstellar.
Since I'm not really familiar with the music from most of the movies here, I can't really comment on the arrangements of their suites, but the Star Trek and Star Wars suites were really strange. First, I noticed that the program listed them both as "excerpts" from the two suites, which is odd: that implies that someone wrote suites of music from both movies, and then someone else took bits and pieces out of those suites to make the arrangements we heard, rather than taking the music from the movies themselves. Why would anyone do that?
The orchestra played the ST one first, and it started with the theme from the first movie, which was also used for Star Trek: The Next Generation. After that, it played another piece from the first movie, and then replayed the movie/ST:TNG theme, and then ended. I thought, that was really strange, because usually medley pieces like this usually play at least four different melodies, whereas this one was only two. Medleys may repeat the opening melody, in order to bring the piece to closure, but this one felt odd because there was little else in the piece.
As an example, there's a concert band arrangement of DW music, and it starts with the DW theme (Eleven's version) and then goes through (not listed in order), "The Doctor's Theme", "Rose's Theme", "Martha's Theme", "The Cybermen", "The Dark and Endless Dalek Night", and "I Am the Doctor", giving the audience a good sampling of the show's music. When my low-level band played it, we found "I Am the Doctor" (which was the last in the medley) too difficult, so the conductor replaced it with a reprise of the DW theme, and this was fine because there was so many other songs between the opening and the repeat at the end.
So anyway, the ST medley was short, only included two songs, and was repetitive. It also felt, to me, a little disrespectful, as the concert was supposed to be a showcase of science fiction music and ST, one of the two biggest sci-fi IPs, got such a tiny part. Both the Interstellar and Guardians of the Galaxy pieces felt much longer and more skillfully arranged.
The SW one was the showcase of the concert, so it was near the end, and it was weird in a different way. It was arranged in four movements, meaning four pieces that are separated by a short pause (as opposed to a medley, which have multiple pieces that move directly to the next without stopping).
The first movement was the main SW theme, Leia's theme, and one other very recognizable SW melody that I can't remember the name of. The fourth movement was the medal ceremony music, the main SW theme, and Leia's theme. The thing is, for both of these movements, they began with playing through one iteration of the melody (the SW main theme for the first, the medal ceremony for the fourth), and then, the rest of both movements were this weird montage of songs, for example, four measures of Leia's theme, then two measures of the SW main theme, then a bit more of Leia's theme, then four measures of the recognizable melody that I couldn't name, etc.
I could see an interesting music theory point to it, that the different melodies in the movie seem very disparate but they do all fit together in a way, but as a listener, I didn't enjoy it, because I couldn't sit back and just listen to these great songs -- one would start and switch to a different song partway through the phrase. I think it would have been cool if they had played the SW main theme, then Leia's theme, then the song I don't know the name of, and then played a section that cleverly combined all three together, so that we got to hear all three musical statements fully and then how they fit with each other, but we never got to hear more than fragments of Leia's theme or the other song.
And then repeating that style of jumble again for the fourth movement just really left a bad taste in my mouth. (Bad sound in my ear? Bad metaphor.)
The third movement was music that I didn't recognize, so I figure it was from one of the newer movies, which I have never seen and will never see. :P
But the second movement was "The Imperial March", pretty much just like the original from beginning to end. So this time, the arrangement was fine. However, the interpretation...
"Interpretation" means how the conductor chooses to have the orchestra play the music. One conductor might take a song and decide to play it soft, light, and jaunty, while another might slow it down a bit and make it more moody. There's a lot of things that a conductor can change to make the music come out the way he wants, such as how loud or how soft, how smoothly or how separated the notes are played, etc.
In this particular case, the conductor chose to play "The Imperial March" at march tempo, which the phrase for playing it at two beats per second, which is the timing of military marching footsteps. Think of any Sousa march ("The Stars and Stripes Forever", or "The Washington Post March", for example), and then think of "The Imperial March" at the same speed. It's too fast.
"The Imperial March" is Darth Vader, the big evil baddie in the black helmet and cape, making his big entrance, striding in as if he owns the place, because he does. The music is supposed to be stately and menacing. Speeding it up to military march tempo almost made it comical.
But you might have noticed that I haven't talked about "I Am the Doctor", and that's because it was the biggest disappointment. Honestly, with what they did to that piece, they just shouldn't have bothered including it.
When you think about that song, you probably hear the most repeated part in the show, played whenever Eleven is about to win the day. You know, "doot doot doot, de doot doot dooo..." But though that's the most iconic part of the piece, it's only one of many parts. There are something like five or six different musical statements throughout the whole piece, and the playtime of the piece on the soundtrack (depending on the performance) is four to five minutes.
The thing that the orchestra played was less than 1.5 minutes long, and did NOT include the most iconic part Moreover, the conductor's interpretation of the music was akin to a ballad, with lilting strings and none of the energy that the Eleventh Doctor embodied. Obviously, neither the conductor nor the person who arranged that piece of music knew nothing about the show or how the music was used.
When it ended, my husband and I kind of looked at each other dumbfounded, and then clapped not because we enjoyed it, but because it was DW and we felt we had to.
The conductor
Despite the two-page-long essay above, though, the greater disappointment in the concert was due to the conductor, for many reasons.
First, you know how symphony conductors usually wear a tux or tails, or if it's a casual concert, they're in a dark tailored suit? Not this guy. He was wearing this floppy baggy shirt, bright white with some kind of black swirl or flower print. And like other symphony conductors, he moved around a lot, swinging his arms and gesturing in huge motions. But, with the white shirt flapping all over the place, against a background of his orchestra all dressed in formal black, he was a huge visual distraction. My husband actually closed his eyes to be able to listen to the music, because the conductor distracting him if he kept his eyes open.
But, what was worse was what the conductor did between the pieces. This was a casual concert intended to celebrate sci-fi movie music, and as such, the conductor spoke to the audience between the pieces to talk about them. (This often doesn't happen for more formal concerts, where the spoken part is limited to announcing what the next piece will be.) Thing is, the conductor didn't actually talk about them. Instead, he made jokes.
For most of the pieces, he gave a fictional biography of the composer or a fictional explanation of the movie. For example, the composer of the music for Ad Astra, who is a modern person, he started by saying, "He was born in 1794..." For Star Wars, he said, "As we all know, the movie follows a boy growing up in a village in Vermont..." so that he could end it with the joke, "and thus caused Hayden Christiansen to decide to become an actor, a decision that we have all regretted since." (The joke is that people have generally disliked the modern SW movies and Anakin in particular, so we all regret that Hayden Christiansen became an actor and played Anakin.) For Doctor Who, he told a story about how some BBC people heard the Thompson Twins song "Doctor, Doctor" in a pub and the idea for a new TV show popped into their heads.
I mean, they're not even good jokes.
The worst was his spiel for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. At two times during the concert, he talked about how music always really moved him because music is the one thing that connects people to each other. So, considering that Close Encounters is entirely about aliens attempting to communicate with humans using music, using a sequence of five notes that's repeated in both the movie and in the piece that they played, do you think that that's what he talked about? Of course not. He made a joke that Steven Spielberg and John Williams used to play hockey together when they were kids -- "he shoots, he scores". Which I will admit, was a clever joke and yes, I did laugh, as did most of the audience. But then, he pretended that someone in the front row didn't get the joke and then proceeded to explain at length why it was funny.
You'd think that if music connecting people was a big deal to him, he'd jump on the opportunity to talk about how it was a major theme in the movie he's talking about. But no, he decided to go with a joke.
The thing is, I said that he did this for "most" of the pieces. For Khachaturian's "Gayane's Adagio" that was used in "2001", he told the story of the ballet that the song is from, what happens in the ballet (in the Soviet Union, a woman finds out that her husband is a traitor to the state and turns him in), and the reasons why Khachaturian wrote the ballet (as a subtle form of protest in the guise of state-aligned ideology). However, he'd told fictional tales about all of the other pieces, so we didn't know if we should believe what he was saying about this one. I had to go look it up to find out if it was true. (It was.)
There was one other thing he said that I thought was very telling. Just before the Star Wars suite, he said, "I'm really grateful I had the opportunity to work with the orchestra to get familiar with this music over the past month." Really? Before this month, you weren't familiar with the Star Wars Main Theme or The Imperial March? How does anyone nowadays not know these pieces? I can understand people not knowing any of the others, but the SW Main Theme has been one of the most recognizable pieces of movie music for almost fifty years now, and John Williams is a household name.
But then it clicked. He doesn't watch movies and only listens to and performs a narrow range of musical genres, so he doesn't know these SW pieces, even though they're iconic and ubiquitous. This suggests that he doesn't know anything about the films represented in this concert, and there were too many for him to actually go watch and see how the music was used in them. That's why he made up funny composer biographies and movie summaries: he didn't know enough about them to be able to talk about them with any authority. That's why his interpretations of "The Imperial March" and "I Am the Doctor" felt so wrong. And that's why he missed his opportunity to use Close Encounters to make his personal point.
My husband and I have been talking about the concert, and we came to the additional conclusion that he's an attention whore. His monologues felt like comedy routines intended to demonstrate how clever he is, rather than education for the audience about the music and the movies or any attempts to put the spotlight on the musicians. And we think his bright white flappy shirt was meant to draw the eye to him, away from his musicians (though that intention was probably subconscious).
Anyway, we both decided independently that we won't be attending any more concerts where he's the conductor, which is really sad. I think our local symphony is pretty good, and I loved the previous conductor. Who knows how long this new conductor is going to stay?
