Prom 38: BBC Concert Orchestra/Lockhart – review

Royal Albert Hall, London

Stravinsky wrote that film music should bear the same relationship to the film drama as "somebody's piano playing in my living-room has to the book I am reading". He was quite wrong, of course, and many find they would leave off reading to hear the pianist better. But he was partly right: you can rarely discard the book altogether.

This is why the most powerful item in this film music Prom – performed by Keith Lockhart and his indefatigable BBC Concert Orchestra – turned out to be Walton's Henry V, for which the actor Rory Kinnear read selections from Shakespeare's play. I thought it would be Herrmann's Psycho, which is a superbly crafted score. But the famous string glissandi which, in the film, mark the shift from growing unease to open-mouthed horror were here greeted by an outbreak of chuckling. By contrast, Kinnear's masterfully delivered readings held the entire hall spellbound, preparing perfectly a space for Walton's beautifully orchestrated score and its subtle exploitation of French and English folk material.

Before last year's Hamlet, Kinnear was probably best known as chief of staff to Judy Dench's M in Quantum of Solace. Should he have performed a selection of James Bond one-liners for the John Barry arrangement? Maybe, but in fact David Arnold, the current composer of choice for the Bond franchise, had arranged his predecessor's iconic extracts with such evident love that the listener's passions were seamlessly stirred, not shaken. For the rest, limitless charm oozed from Richard Rodney Bennett's Murder on the Orient Express, while the extracts from Star Wars et al oozed Williams. A suite arranged from Jonny Greenwood's score to Norwegian Wood was admirably economical in composition, but too muddily orchestrated to have much effect in the concert hall.

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Guy Dammann

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