Cinematic Sinfonia, Crouch End Festival Chorus, conducted by Ludwig Wicki

Royal Albert Hall, October 24, 2017

A musical tribute to the life and music of James Horner.

This world premiere of Avex’s celebration of James Horner’s work certainly aimed high, with pieces from across his career, stretching back to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), and with a few tweaks, this will be a terrific addition to the concert repertoire.

Horner’s music could easily have stood alone but Avex added value with new interviews from four of the directors with whom he worked – Sir Richard Eyre, talking about Iris; Ron Howard, discussing Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind; James Cameron, covering Aliens, Titanic and Avatar; and Mel Gibson, becoming quite emotional on the subject of Braveheart. All four were fulsome in their praise of Horner’s abilities, noting where he would sometimes bring ideas to the table that were diametrically opposite to what they were expecting (or expected of him) but which worked wonderfully in context. Cameron and Howard also mentioned their early link with Horner via Roger Corman, although perhaps a trick was missed by not using the theme, or an extract from Battle Beyond the Stars to punctuate this. Much as I love it, we could have lost Krull from the programme – anyone who didn’t know their SF movie history would assume this was the Corman film Cameron referred to.

The Avatar director pointed out that there was a certain continuity between Horner’s scores, and that’s perhaps more obvious when pieces are heard in quick succession – elements of the underscores for Star Trek II, Krull, Aliens and The Rocketeer felt moderately interchangeable, albeit with different themes running above them. The use of percussion, and the themes rising from the depths of the orchestra through the ranks in particular stood out. In the later work, Braveheart, Titanic and Avatar shared certain musical strands of DNA and it was good to hear other pieces such as Iris and A Beautiful Mind alongside them – the latter was the stand-out performance of the evening, and was rightly repeated as the encore.

The Cinematic Sinfonia and the Crouch End Festival Chorus were ably conducted by Ludwig Wicki, who pulled things quickly back on track on the few occasions they slipped. The percussion section of the Sinfonia deserve special mention – they were running back and forth between the various instruments as well as having to twirl light sticks to achieve the “interstellar” effects at the start and end of the Star Trek II main title!

Each piece was accompanied on the big screen by a picture of a poster from the movie in question, presented as if in an art gallery, with the camera panning up and down the image. While I can understand the desire not to distract from the music (and posters being easily accessible), I would suggest that this element is rethought – either by using more than one of the international posters (Aliens, for example, was the single-word version, rather than anything depicting the Xenomorph or the iconic shot of Sigourney Weaver), or with some well-known images from the movies.

Verdict: A good celebration of Horner’s work that has the potential to be great. 8/10

Paul Simpson