With the holiday falling awkwardly in the middle of the week this year, many fans of Halloween did their "observing" this past weekend. Among the festivities for me was a Friday night trip to the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, which was presenting another of their "score live to film" concerts for a most appropriate movie: Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. This wasn't the first time for me that the pairing of Tim Burton and Danny Elfman was the topic of a symphony performance; a few years back, I attended a CSO concert that presented musical highlights from all their collaborations together. But this time out, it was the entire score of the one film -- and what a great film it made for this treatment.
The Nightmare Before Christmas is a short movie, running only around an hour and 15 minutes. But in that time, the orchestra is silent for only perhaps a collective 60 seconds. The score is relentless, almost non-stop, giving you as much music or more than many movies twice the length -- and in this case, just as much opportunity to study what all the parts of the orchestra are doing.
There's a sprinkling of atypical instruments in the mix for this score. A pair of saxophone players were on hand, together covering the full spectrum of the instrument's types. One harp player simply wasn't enough; this score needed two. There was also a synthesizer on hand, controlled by a keyboard player; it picked up rare sounds throughout, and seemed to substitute for the squeeze box that pops up throughout the score (most notably in "Sally's Song").
Ah, the songs. That, of course, made this different from any of the previous film concerts I've seen at the symphony. It's impressive enough to keep an entire orchestra perfectly on tempo to sync music to picture, but the degree of difficulty feels more present when songs are in the mix. The vocals, of course, were playing dry and unalterable in the movie's audio track, while the conductor led the orchestra in the accompaniment. And for this score, that was an especially tricky proposition.
Seeing the music played live and really focusing on it made me aware of just how complex it is. It's loaded with tempo changes (which I could even watch, over the shoulder of the conductor as the markings on his personal TV screen would warn they were coming). There are odd time signatures (7/4 in one of Jack's leitmotifs), many bars of otherwise 4/4 music with inserted (or removed) beats, and odd pauses that disrupt the rhythm ("What's This?"). That everything stayed perfectly on course in the live performance was a testament to how great these musicians are.
I was wowed all over again by the concert, even though by now I've seen half a dozen or more of these score-to-film performances. (I also appreciated, as much as I do like John Williams, that this concert took a break from him and gave another composer the spotlight. The CSO will be back to Williams later in the season, though.) I know I say this every time I go to one of these shows, but if you're a fan of film music at all, you should definitely look into a show like this -- here in Denver if you're local, or by whatever orchestra might be near you.
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