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You can always rely on the British weather - rely on it to be crap that is! Last Sunday we had clear blue skies and glorious views all around. Come the day of Howard Shore's concert we had (of course) rain, cold and mist. But that wasn't going to dampen the enthusiasm of our little group of Ringers from the Decipher fan club boards and TOR.n. Oh no!
		First up on the day's activities was a Thames boat trip for 19 of us. "Commentary in English, Spanish, German, French and Japanese" a sign on the side of the boat promised. Alas, no Quenya or Sindarin! The weather was miserable but to be honest, little attention was being paid to the great London landmarks around us - people were too busy renewing old friendships from previous moots, introducing themselves to new ones and generally having a good old boat moot where we could have been on dry land and nobody would have been any the wiser. The boat trip made everyone feel a little chilly however, so it was off to a cafe for hot coffee and cake. Brian Sibley had taken some friendly ribbing for the number of times his mobile phone rang while we were at the moot point and then again on the boat (he had taken a day out of a hectic production schedule for his new BBC radio series on Movie Music to join us) but all such ribbing stopped when his phone rang in the cafe and he was heard to say "Hi Andy". Yes, it was THAT Andy - everyone's favourite CGI actor Gollum aka Mr Serkis! Leaving Brian and a few others on terra firma, the rest of us, headed for our own private pod on The London Eye with our "in flight" crew totalling 25. Professional magician and Magic Circle member David Weeks kept us all thoroughly entertained with an impressive set of tricks based around The One Ring verse (although thankfully stopped before he got to the "Nine men doomed to die"). One of my funniest memories of the day is getting off the pod to arrive at the photo booth where TV monitors showed photo's of people in each pod for purchase. Our group stood out on the monitors because we all had our backs to the cameras - too engrossed in David's trick to hear the announcement to face the other way for our photo! We joined up with the rest of the party and numbered 30 by the time we made The Pizza Express for lunch. A juggler was at the venue to entertain us all, but was pretty much ignored by our party who were more intrigued by more magic tricks from Brian Sibley's partner David. On what was supposed to be a day off he worked the tables hard, performing tricks along the table for individuals as we waited for food, leaving too many of us scratching our heads wondering "How the hell did he do that?". For my part I tried to ignore the magic - I had a sleepless night the first time David had shown me a trick where I had tightly grasped three coins in my hand and he'd made a fourth coin "fly" into it. It still freaks me out! Hats off to the Pizza Express for coping admirably with our number and being efficient at getting us served with the correct drinks and food. Also a big thanks from all of us to the wonderful Maria (Sam Wood) who had come up with the idea of booking the pod on The London Eye and then ended up organising the boat trip and the restaurant without any help from me at all (Sorry!). Great job Maria! Having been fed and watered it was time to head off for the day's concert - part of the LPH's "Roots Day" which provided an extremely diverse range of music over a four hour period running from 3pm to 7pm.......
		First up was Luke Daniels with The Solaris String Quartet and other musicians (including James O'Grady who really ought to have his own fan web site ;-)) performing The Lost Music of the Gaels. No photo's I'm afraid as I didn't want to disturb the musicians. Back-projected movie footage showed a mysterious character strolling around the English countryside through Autumn and Winter and was beautifully done. Just occasionally it was a little out of place with the music (we were all trying to work out what the close-up of the walker's packet of fags had to do with a piece on "a war between the little faeries and the big faeries" - stop making your own jokes up at the back there!) All-in-all this was an excellent start to the day's concert and I'd happily go and see Luke Daniels and his musicians perform his work again. This was followed by, what was by pretty common concensus, the least popular piece of the day (Stravinsky can be hard work!): L'Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale). Full marks to the London Philharmonic for trying to liven this up by performing live music to what was an excellent animated film, but compared with the original material (Brian Sibley alerted me to an excellent recording with Christopher Lee reading all the speaking parts) this rather strange edit of the storyline made for a very confusing narrative which just didn't work for me (or, it seems, many others). Things were starting to run late by the time Tannoura came on to perform Music and Dance of the Dervishes. This really was one of those "you had to be there to understand" performances which no account or photo's can really capture. Two separate dancers in two separate performances basically whirled around very fast to Arabic music with some very colourful costumes. They did this for a good 15-20 minutes in a trance-like state to a mainly percussive accompaniement. It was a very entertaining performance, and particularly entertaining for what was largely a family audience with a lot of young children likely to get bored by traditional classical music. I felt dizzy just watching, and to see someone whirling so fast for so long and then stop dead on the spot without falling over - well, it was pretty awesome! It was REALLY popular with the crowd although personally I thought it went on a bit TOO long. After our third intermission it was time for the main event: Howard Shore and the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing The Fellowship of the Ring for Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. I was impressed by how quickly a serious number of people managed to get thier instruments set up on stage. No posy endless tuning up or time-wasting here. Howard came up and got a warm reception - more subdued than the Hollywood Bowl concert but by usually "reserved" Brit standards, pretty impressive. The concert started promptly without any unnecessary introductions and the next hour, for most gathered there, was an occasionally flawed, but nevertheless impressive, performance by one of the world's leading orchestras. Back projections of movie stills helped fill the casual viewer in to which part of the score was being performed, and it was all as seamlessly segued as it had been at the August Hollywood Bowl performance. My American friend Bernadette felt this performance was far superior to the Hollywood Bowl performance (which had a different orchestra and conductor). Certainly the Royal Festival Hall has the better acoustics, and this was a much more intimate affair. For my part, I didn't think the difference in performance was THAT marked (but I'm not a classical musician). Thankfully the solo male soprano sang less flat notes than his Hollywood counterpart, but I felt he really struggled to make himself heard over the orchestra at those key poignant moments from the movie (which nevertheless had a seriously large number of males dabbing at their eyes!). This seemed to be down to the performer moving away from the microphone to look at Howard conducting on certain lines. I also thought the deep male choir struggled on those Moria chants to sound like a real orc army, and needed more numbers to help, but otherwise the concert was pretty near perfect for me.
For those in our party who'd travelled from Scotland, Sheffield and Leeds for the performance the verdict was unanimous - this was an awesome concert and one more than worth the trip from distant places. Personally, I'm still trying to work out where the hour went - time stood still and the hour seemed to last more like 15 minutes and I'm certainly not the first one to make this observation. Howard appeared to be genuinely moved at the enthusiastic response he got when performance of the piece was over - three standing ovations! Alas, for those hoping for an encore it was not to be! The poor man had stepped straight off a plane, into an intense day and half of rehearsals before the concert and was then staight off the following morning on another plane with work to be done for new music on The Two Towers extended DVD version. For most then, a special day, and one thankfully closer to home than most events which seem to centre around Los Angeles. Talking of which the next scheduled Web log report is due around Oscar Party time, and where last year I seemed to be in a party of one representing the British contingent this time around there'll be a few more of us (see below!)......
Don't forget you can check out reports of lots of other Lord of the Rings -themed events in the Web Logs section

Email: ian@iansmith.co.uk