| The Hollywood symphony “The Lord of the Rings” was played in Moscow The backstory of the event is simple: Canadian film composer Howard Shore - one of the most venerable Hollywood composers (and what could be more significant for the reputation and finances of a modern composer than good Hollywood fame) - wrote the soundtrack for Peter Jackson's film trilogy "The Lord of the Rings" based on the cult book by Tolkien . Twelve hours of bloated, majestic music for a ten-hour, unwieldy blockbuster that swept through its source and the world's audience with megatons of lush pathos. The soundtrack won an Oscar. This has already happened once with the musical water of “Titanic” - composers receive Oscars as if for cash.
With this everything is more or less clear. But it is not at all clear (and this question has completely tormented many) why skillfully assembled hours of musical material (condensed, however, to two), professionally produced in the popular Hollywood technique of rising and falling sound mountains, should be rolled around the world in a live form, without the blockbuster itself, but with an orchestra (in Moscow it was the National Philharmonic), a choir (Academy of Choral Art) and the Norwegian soloist Sisel. All this is too similar to the principle of recycling - the blockbuster movie floated safely into the depths of the collective unconscious (if it ever surfaced from there at all), and so did the music, but the components of dying products in a modern economy must certainly go into use.
The only reason why the soundtrack, poor in music but filled with grandeur as such, could be re-eaten would be a multimedia show. Actually, they were waiting for him. They talked about a terrible number of different special effects, ingenious synchronization of video sequences and subdued musical material. Tickets costing from 500 to 10 thousand rubles, according to the organizers, were sold out by 85% (visually it was a huge half-empty stall and a full gallery). No Tolkienists - the public is increasingly peaceful and seemingly hard-working.
If the attentive consumer had paid attention to one nuance in the story of Shore's Symphony, he might not have waited in vain for magnificent multimedia breakthroughs into the heavens of the entertainment industry. The word “symphony” in the title of the project was written not as it is written in the case of Haydn or Beethoven, but as the titans of the European post-war avant-garde came up with the idea of using it - with a capital letter. It would be unwise to imagine Howard Shore being, say, Luciano Berio, but the composer and his team's awareness of deft semantic and formal maneuvers might well be at play. But it turned out that Shore capitalizes the word “symphony” not for any reason, but simply because it is big, white, fluffy and, moreover, the main one on the stage. It turned out that the lighting effects are just beautiful illumination of the scenes, that the videos are beautifully inserted into a golden frame and perfectly mixed illustrations for one of the editions of Tolkien’s book (the authors of the excellent drawings are John Howe and Alan Lee), and the sound effects, except There are no announced but completely indistinguishable tricks of the score. The main problem with the Moscow performance was that the Symphony, overwhelming the other elements of the show with its pale grandeur, was downright terribly overdubbed. How this happened is a complete mystery: it would be strange to blame the acoustics of the Kremlin Palace, since there is probably the best equipment in the country here (those who have heard “Tosca” by the Roman Opera here understand). Apparently, the sound engineers wanted the product to appear in all its natural symphonic naturalness. But the illustrative music, assembled from a couple of tiny themes and endless, successive sequences, was still composed with Dolby surround in mind. And the fact that the composer, as it turned out, was also simultaneously thinking about the glory of a real symphonist, was not embodied in the music. Serround came to fruition, but symphonism did not.
So this sticky blockbuster filler remained in the Kremlin, somehow naked and defenseless. Sisel's quasi-Celtic voice coquettishly stuck out from the choir barrel, the orchestra either melted or bristled, and only the drawings brightened up the loneliness of the gloomy and funny, slow and drawn-out plot, if anyone remembered it at all. Yulia BEDEROVA |
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