ALL TIME HIGH: BARRY STRIKES DUBLIN
LIKE THUNDERBALL!
RTÉ Summer Evening Concert Season: The Film Music of John
Barry
The National Concert Hall, Dublin, Friday 20 June, 2008
Report by John Exshaw – 22/6/08
To say that the John Barry concert in Dublin on Friday 20 June went over big would
be a gross understatement, if not an outright distortion. Giving the first-ever
concert of his film music in the capital, the multiple Oscar-winning composer
was cheered to the rafters by a packed house at the National Concert Hall – and
before a single note had even been played. By the end of the evening – and two
standing ovations later – it was clear that the 74-year-old veteran, who seemed
genuinely moved by the warmth of his reception, could consider his no-doubt arduous
six-hour flight from New York to have been very much worth the effort, a
sentiment heartily endorsed by his enthusiastic and appreciative audience.
The concert, part of the Summer Evening season arranged by
RTÉ, the national broadcaster, and featuring the RTÉ National Symphony
Orchestra, was presented by AedÃn Gormley, host of the station’s Movie &
Musicals programme on lyric fm, which was broadcasting the event
live, and it was a pleasant surprise to learn that Barry himself would take the
baton for the two opening pieces, Goldfinger (1964) and We Have All
the Time in the World (from On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 1969),
as it had initially been thought that he would only be in attendance, rather
than participating.
When the applause that greeted these
two pieces had eventually subsided, Barry gave way on the podium to Nicholas
Dodd – orchestrator and conductor of, inter alia, the Bond movies The
World is Not Enough (1999), Die Another Day (2002) and Casino
Royale (2006) – who proceeded to send a shiver down the collective spine
with the ominous and threatening theme from Zulu (1964), followed by Somewhere
in Time (1980), Moviola (1993), and the main themes from The
Persuaders (1971-1972), Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), and Midnight
Cowboy (1969, and featuring an excellent, mournful harmonica solo by John
Murray Ferguson), before taking us into the interval with a suite comprising
pieces from Dances with Wolves (1990).
The second part of the concert
included Born Free (1966), All Time High (from Octopussy,
1983), Out of Africa (1985, and a particular favourite of Gormley’s
listeners on RTÉ lyric fm), Body Heat (1981, featuring a
marvellously slinky sax solo by Fintan Sutton), the incidental piece Space
March from You Only Live Twice (1967), and the theme from The
Knack…and How to Get It (1965). The finale was provided by the James
Bond Suite, a suitably roof-raising crowd-pleaser comprised of 007, From
Russia with Love (both 1963), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live
Twice, Diamonds Are Forever (1971) and On
Her Majesty’s Secret Service as well.
During this amazing sequence, Dodd
not only got the best out of the orchestra (ably led by first violin, Alan
Smale), but provided a splendid spectacle himself – arms waving, hair flying
everywhere, hands thrusting out, cajoling and coaxing, his body swaying and
bouncing to the rhythm – at one point so wrapped up in the music that he had to
turn two pages of the score in immediate succession just to catch up with
himself (even though it was obvious he knows it all by heart).
John Barry then came onto the
podium for the first of his standing ovations, before removing himself to a
safe distance as Dodd tore into an encore of the full 007 piece. When
Barry rejoined him, Dodd proved himself as good at working an audience as he is
at working an orchestra, giving the crowd an exaggerated deaf ear gesture to
encourage even more applause for the beaming Barry, who closed proceedings with
a brief but heartfelt thank-you speech.
At the reception afterwards, and
spurred on by the stern maxim that ‘Cinema Retro always gets its man’, I
managed to ask Barry a few questions before being stampeded by a pack of
autograph hounds. What criteria, I enquired, does he apply when approached to
score a film? To which, in a voice still retaining traces of his native
Yorkshire, he replied, “I think the number one single thing is a great script –
that it’s a really great story, you know, with a beginning and a middle and an
end, and it’s almost like a piece of literature. And then the director, of
course. Meet with the director and see that he loves it and what he’s going to
do with it. And once you get a great script and a great director, you’re in
very good shape.â€
Remembering that Sergio Leone
would sometimes preface a question to Ennio Morricone by helpfully saying, “You
know, it’s the one which goes da-da-daâ€, I asked Barry what happens if the
director is a musical illiterate and says, I’d like a bit here that goes dum-dee-dum-dee-dum?
“Then fuck you!†Barry laughs. “ No, no, the good directors trust you, they
don’t start whistling things in your ear because, you know, they either hire
you because you know what the hell you’re doing – so don’t hire me and then
start telling me what to do! I mean, [with] a good director I say, what kind of
a mood do you want, what are we trying to say? Like Out of Africa,
Sydney Pollack talked what he wanted then I went away and wrote it. So
that kind of help – what the emotion is between the two main characters and all
that, that’s the kind of direction I like, and I can use.
Recalling also Morricone’s assertion that, unlike other
composers, a film composer must be familiar with the musical style of any era
in which a movie might be set, I asked Barry if, with a film like The Lion
in Winter (1968, set in medieval England), he had to research the musical
history of the period. “No,†he replied, “because I studied with Dr. Francis
Jackson, who was my first teacher and he was a Master of Music at York Minster,
so all that choral stuff in Latin, I knew all that. So although everybody
thought, oh this is new, it was actually sort of the first stuff I’d done, so
that’s why I loved doing that movie.â€
Soon after which the autograph hounds butted in, so I took
my leave and found refuge on a sofa next to Nicholas Dodd, still perspiring
happily following his tremendous exertions onstage. Seizing the moment, I asked
him how he came to be involved with tonight’s concert, and about his
association with John Barry. Pausing only to wipe his brow, he said, “Well, the
first time John saw me working was in Abbey
Road studios, on an album of The Ten Tenors. They
were taking his famous themes, like Out of Africa,
and [long-time Barry collaborator] Don Black put lyrics to them and I was the
orchestrator. And John had heard of me because I’ve been involved in the last
three James Bonds, orchestrating, conducting. I’d met him a couple of times,
but at that point it’s when he saw me – I think it was about three or four
years ago – and things sort of progressed from there . . .â€
Remarking on his obvious joy in conducting, I asked if there
was something particular in John Barry’s music to which he responded. “Damn
good themes!†he responded without hesitation. “And that’s it. Beautifully
orchestrated by Nic Raine and beautifully played this evening by the RTÉ
National. It’s absolutely marvelous the way they played. And they’re just good
themes and well-orchestrated – it’s just thoroughly good music.†From a
technical point of view, are some of them harder to get right in performance
than others? “Not really, no. All of John’s music and all of his themes – and
that’s why he is a legend and so well-known and loved – [succeed because] quite
simply he writes music that communicates very easily to most people. And it’s
very accessible music, so whilst a theme may be different, like Out of
Africa which seems to have just a little more coherency in the sense of
being such a strong theme – whereas others are not so well-known and not so
popular. But that doesn’t mean to say they’re any less of a theme. So, in a
technical sense, they’re all the same, to bring out the push-and-pull of the
phrase.â€
Before hitting the highway, I buttonholed Julie Knight,
press officer of RTÉ lyric fm, to discover if there were any plans for
further movie-related concerts. Nothing definite, she replied, though she
intended to pursue a suggestion put to her this evening that a certain
well-known Continental composer might be persuaded to do his thing at the NCH
in the near future – provided, of course, that the sky does not fall on his
aged head in the meantime and that Paris
is not burning . . .
Click here to listen to a podcast of the concert