In The Snow with Scott and Brabbins
This weekend, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra will perform Vaughan Williams's score to Scott of the Antarctic live to picture, with Martyn Brabbins conducting. It's the last performance of the film this year, the 150th anniversary of VW's birth.
It's been a true labour of love for me and it's been terrific to bring it to big audiences around the UK: the premiere in March with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in London; in Liverpool with the RLPO in October and in Birmingham with the CBSO a couple of weeks ago. Bringing it to Glasgow on Saturday will be fitting, as the BBCSSO was originally set to give the premiere over 2 years ago but, along with everything else, it was cancelled thanks to Covid.
Working on the score for Scott was deeply satisfying. Such wonderful music! And we've had some fantastic reviews in the national press, which is very unusual for a Live Film screening and therefore extremely gratifying.
I wrote about the various challenges of the project for the CBSO programme booklet and reproduce it here:
When I first decided to do Scott with live score, I had to establish the quality of the whole soundtrack. It was made in the 1940s so, although it had been substantially cleaned up for the Blu-ray remastering (brilliantly, I might add, along with the incredibly job they did on the print itself), this still meant that the music was on the same track as the dialogue and effects. For these projects, of course, we have to remove the music so we can play it live and that means a specialist job for a specialist company. Audionamix in LA are leaders in this field and I’ve used them before on various projects. They took the full soundtrack of the film and then, using their software, removed the music, leaving the dialogue and effects intact. It’s an extraordinary process - as if the music was never there! - and particularly challenging with this soundtrack as it was all recorded in mono and not that well. With modern movies (most of them post-1960) all the audio tracks are separate, so it’s just a case of ‘switching off’ the music track.
Meanwhile, I worked on the score, using the full reconstruction of VW’s film score that had been done by Martin Yates, published by OUP. Martin reconstructed, from original manuscripts, all the music that VW wrote for the film and in its original form, before any additional editing etc had been done on the film. This was my template. But the film only has about half of that music in it - which reveals, perhaps, that VW didn’t always write ‘to picture’ but wrote away from the film itself, producing music of different moods, paces etc which were then moulded into shape by Ernest Irving to synch with the film.
Also, a lot of the cues were cut either altogether or literally just cut off - not always very subtly! I had to put together something of a jigsaw puzzle, using Martin Yates’s reconstruction and my ears with the actual film score. Some cues were in a different order, or had extra bars, or even - in a few places - completely different music. It’s the part of the job I love the most - detective work, piecing it all together. There were some cues by VW that were clearly meant for scenes that didn’t make it into the film - or were cut. But there were also cues that were written for scenes but the music wasn’t then used, for whatever reason. For two sections - near the beginning of the movie when Scott is talking to his wife (the ‘Sculpture Scene’) and right near the end when the explorers have ‘only eleven miles’ to go, I put VW’s music back in. They are only short sections but I think VW’s sense of drama is worth hearing in those scenes and it gives the film a ‘Composer’s Cut’.
The next challenge, once the written score is ready, is to synchronise the music with the film which means I prepare a ‘Conductor Screen’ which has lots of visual aids to allow the conductor to synchronise the live music with the film exactly as it is in the original. In modern films, most film scores are recorded to a click track, so the tempi are (usually) as solid as a rock. But in the 1940s they didn’t have click tracks so everything was recorded by the tempo set by the conductor (in Scott’s case, Ernest Irving). So there are a lot of variations in tempi across the cues which then have to be worked out for our live performance. It’s quite a fiddly process but crucial for the success of a live performance and for the conductor to keep everything in time. That is an art in itself, because the conductor - instead of only having to think about musical interpretation - also has to synchronise the music exactly to a fixed entity (the film). It should be said that Martyn Brabbins had never done this before but, with only one rehearsal with the technology (because he doesn’t own a computer!), he absolutely nailed it.
Working with Martyn Brabbins has been a particular pleasure. I first met him when he arrived, fresh from study in Russia, to conduct the Kent County Youth Orchestra in 1988 (I was a percussionist). We loved him immediately because he seemed like 'one of us'; a trombonist, for a start, who would drink with us in the bar. The programme he conducted was terrific and pure youth orchestra material, especially for us: 'The Chairman Dances' (John Adams), Billy The Kid Suite (Copland) and Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances. Meaty stuff!
In one of the evening rehearsals, I was given the chance to conduct a couple of my pieces with the orchestra (I wrote a few for them that were performed) and Martyn stayed on to listen, which was both hugely generous and, for me, rather intimidating! But it meant we struck up a friendship that lasted beyond the orchestra course, helped by the fact that one of our course supervisors, Tim Baker, was one of Martyn's oldest friends.
Once I started as a presenter on BBC Radio 3, our paths crossed many times, most memorably when I recorded a series of 'In at the Deep End' shows that included having to conduct a symphony orchestra in a concert that would be broadcast. Conducting was not alien to me, I'd done a lot of it, but not with a professional orchestra and certainly not for a national broadcast. The piece was Weber's Oberon Overture which starts with a lone horn line before the strings come in. Inevitably, when I started the piece, the horn player put it down a tone so that when the strings arrived it sounded dreadful. The orchestra fell about. But what they didn't know was that I not only have perfect pitch but was also experienced enough in the world of orchestras to predict that this would happen, so I let it play out, much to their satisfaction.
Martyn was my guide and coach and I can't think of many that would've been so much fun and relaxed about it. And he's also brilliant at talking about music, so was a welcome guest on any show I presented.
About a decade later, Martyn took over as Artistic Director of the Cheltenham Music Festival and I was presenting all the concerts for Radio 3 in his first year, so we got to work together again. Two things I remember most about that year of the festival: Martyn conducted all the Tchaikovsky symphonies in a row in one day (for reasons that escape me now); and, most memorable of all (for all the wrong reasons), the 7/7 bombings in London. We were due to broadcast a live concert from the Pittville Pump Rooms that morning featuring Susan Tomes, but the news from London meant that we were all a bit shellshocked and, crucially, couldn't get hold of loved ones back in the city, as all mobile signals had been shut down. Susan didn't want to perform until she knew her daughter was OK. And no-one was really in the mood anyway. But we did go ahead in the end and, as always, music gave us what we could not express in words.
Fast forward to 2019 and Martyn called me to say that we should do Scott of the Antarctic with a live score. He was in the middle of a VW cycle (which in the end got delayed because of Covid) and he knew I was producing a lot of live film screenings, so what did I think? I knew the music already, through the 7th Symphony, but hadn't seen the film for many years so I immediately bought it on Blu-ray and was immediately knocked out by the extraordinary remastering of the images. It looked so fresh and rich in colour. And the film itself really stood up, despite being over 70 years old. So that's how we started. And as I say above, Martyn has really 'owned' this score. He's done a remarkable job helping to bring this amazing music to audiences and it's been a privilege to work alongside him on it.
Details of Saturday's performance in Glasgow HERE
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