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Omen II

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Everything posted by Omen II

  1. Yes indeed, I realised I had forgotten the brilliant Sinfonia of London immediately after I posted. You are right that its players are the cream of the major orchestras in the UK, including several members of the LSO, the LPO, the RPO and BBC orchestras. I went to their concerts at the BBC Proms this year and last, both of which were absolute highlights of those seasons. Last year they played Korngold's symphony while this year they played Elgar's Enigma Variations and I will never hear either work played better if I live to be one hundred. I already have tickets to their concert at the Barbican in December, so naughty me for forgetting them.
  2. The ones you have listed Jason are four of the 'big five' professional symphony orchestras based in London (the other being the BBC Symphony Orchestra) and yes, they are all completely separate entities. However, England has a number of other fantastic professional symphony orchestras based outside London, including: The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (based in England's second city) The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (based on the south coast but giving concerts across the southwest and the home counties) The Hallé Orchestra (based in Manchester) The BBC Philharmonic (also based in Manchester) The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra The Royal Northern Sinfonia (based in Gateshead in the northeast) There are also loads of professional chamber orchestras and period ensembles in England, of which there are too many to mention - The BBC Concert Orchestra, The Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, The London Mozart Players, The English Chamber Orchestra, L'Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, The Academy of Ancient Music, etc. I have no doubt forgotten some.
  3. Battle of Britain is another film which had two great scores, the replacement by Ron Goodwin and the original by Sir William Walton whose Battle in the Air was the only piece to survive in the film as released. I like to play both scores around this time of year (Battle of Britain Day in the UK is 15th September) as a tribute to those brave men from the United Kingdom, the Commonwealth and its European allies (biggest shout to the Poles and the Czechs) who saved our country from Nazi invasion in that summer of 1940. Walton's score is more overtly patriotic than Goodwin's but that is no bad thing. The march at the end makes me want to fly a Hurricane at a Dornier and damn the consequences!
  4. This was the thirteenth different John Williams-scored film I have seen live in concert (all of them at the Royal Albert Hall) and I must say that it was a thrill to hear the music 'properly' without the muddy sound of the soundtrack releases to date. That it was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra (led on the Sunday evening performance by Carmine Lauri) made it extra special. I heard and saw details in the orchestration which I had not noticed previously, which is one of the tremendous benefits of the live in concert format. I mentioned double bass player Patrick Laurence earlier in this thread as probably having played on the original soundtrack, so it was good to see him on stage with the rest of the double bass section.
  5. Several of the LSO's longest serving members have retired only within the last couple of years (Colin Renwick, Nigel Broadbent, Lennox MacKenzie, Jenny Brown, etc.) and were around long enough to have played on a 1983 film score. Double bass player Patrick Laurence has been in the LSO since 1982 and is still going strong, so he might well have played on the original score of Return of the Jedi (I have never seen a roster of the musicians to know for certain).
  6. The Imperial State Crown is one of the only two crowns in regular use by the British monarch, the other being the St. Edward’s Crown. Both can be seen among the Crown Jewels kept at the Tower of London on public display. The current Imperial Crown is a remodelling of an original made for Queen Victoria in 1838. It contains a sapphire said to have been worn by Edward the Confessor, as well as the Cullinan II diamond and pearls reputed to have belonged to the first Queen Elizabeth. It is worn at the state opening of Parliament as well as following the coronation.
  7. We do love a good queue do us Brits. In fact we invented the queue, refined and perfected it over many centuries and still lead the world in this ancient and noble art. Most of the people in the queue to file past HM The Queen probably do not even know what they are queueing up for, but considered it too good an opportunity to miss when they spied a column of people snaking through central London. Queue jumping in the United Kingdom remains one of the few offences for which capital punishment is the ultimate sanction available (used only when loud tutting and eye rolling does not have the desired effect).
  8. I went to welcome HM Queen Elizabeth II on her final journey to London at RAF Northolt this evening. Thousands upon thousands lined the roads in the rain for a glimpse of the hearse and to pay their respects. I felt that it was the least I could do for her seventy years of dedicated and selfless service to the UK and the Commonwealth.
  9. The Jurassic Park theme played in Peterborough Cathedral, the resting place of Katherine of Aragon (Henry VIII's first wife) and Mary, Queen of Scots.
  10. I was pleased to see that someone has uploaded to YouTube the full BBC Proms concert of Leonard Bernstein's On the Town recently. Some Other Time is at about 1:52 and is a lovely rendition.
  11. I went to a great BBC Proms concert yesterday in which every piece pertained to the sea. The undoubted highlight was Ralph Vaughan Williams's Sea Symphony in the second half, but the first half also featured two works by British female composers which deserve to be heard more often. Before Grace Williams's Sea Sketches, the concert opened with Doreen Carwithen's Bishop Rock. Carwithen would later marry film composer William Alwyn following a lengthy clandestine affair. The concert will be broadcast on BBC TV tomorrow evening (Friday) for anyone interested.
  12. If you are able to watch BBC TV or have access to the BBC iPlayer, I thoroughly recommend the broadcast of Prom 2 from this season's BBC Proms at 20:00 this evening on BBC Four. I went to the concert last night and it was fantastic - a programme of music from the Sinfonia of London under John Wilson, including Arnold Bax's Tintagel and William Walton's Partita for Orchestra. The concert was bookended by Ralph Vaughan-Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis and Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations and I will be very lucky if I ever hear either piece played better. Huw Watkins, whose entertaining flute concerto we heard performed by Adam Walker, was in the audience. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0019dsf
  13. The Liquidator by Lalo Schifrin, with none other than Shirley Bassey singing the title theme.
  14. I am sure there are loads I could come up with, but a few off the top of my head are: The Outlaw Josey Wales (Jerry Fielding) Hell in the Pacific, The Manitou, Prime Cut, Charley Varrick and Starsky and Hutch (Lalo Schifrin) Flight of the Navigator (Alan Silvestri) Terror Out of the Sky (William Goldstein) Day of the Triffids (Christopher Gunning) Airport 1975 (John Cacavas) At the Earth's Core (Mike Vickers)
  15. Thank you for the reminder, @Yavar Moradi Although money is tight at the moment, I owe it to Benny on his 111th birthday to help bankroll a recording of the score to the film in which he appears. It's what the old curmudgeon wouldn't have wanted. To Lenny! To Benny! I attended a BBC Proms concert at the Royal Albert Hall a few years ago in which the overture from The Man Who Knew Too Much was played. Keith Lockhart played Herrmann that day but they missed a trick by not having a shooter in one of the grand tier boxes.
  16. There are quite a few tickets in the circle in the range of £50 to £60 for most of the performances. The Royal Albert Hall does not permit tickets through resale sites (it is in their terms and conditions) so you are taking a risk if you opt for a resale website. "Tickets sold via third parties and other unauthorised outlets, including online auction sites, are not valid for admission. Reselling a ticket makes it void and the ticketholder may be refused entry." However, what I would do (and you might consider) is to buy a gallery standing ticket for £25. That gives you the guarantee of knowing that you are 'in' and will have a perfectly decent view - albeit up in the gods - at worst. I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire from the gallery and have watched Proms concerts from there too and it is absolutely fine. You will almost always find that other tickets in the stalls, boxes and arena become available at 'normal prices' within a couple of weeks leading up to the concert, so assuming that happens you just need to hold your nerve, keep checking the website nearer the time and buy a better seated ticket. That way you have only lost £25 at worst.
  17. I completely understand the reasons behind the need to curtail the end titles (it was quite late when the film finished) but it would have been really nice to hear the concert version of the Love Theme as an encore. It would have rounded things off nicely.
  18. Ha! You’ve made my day - those were the very cards! I don’t know what happened to them but I wish I’d kept them.
  19. One of my earliest memories is of being taken by my Dad to watch this film when it was first released. At the time sweet shops were selling bubble gum with Superman trading cards (anyone else remember those?) and my Dad used to buy me a pack as a weekly treat. I would give the bubble gum straight to my older siblings and keep the trading cards, for which I had learned all the captions before seeing the film. As you can tell, I have been middle aged since infancy. I remember my Dad telling us to be quiet during the film as my brother and I were calling out the captions from the trading cards at the appropriate point in the film - "Paying a call on Lois Lane!" and "A world torn asunder!", etc. I am sure I had no idea what the word 'asunder' meant, but I have always associated it with Jimmy Olsen taking photographs on a dam, even though it was probably for the destruction of Krypton. My Dad would use the phrase 'paying a call' as a euphemism for going to the toilet, so that caption in particular always amused me. It was nice to attend yesterday with my brother, with whom I had watched the film all those years ago. It was only the second time either of us had seen the film on the big screen. In the box immediately next to us was a little boy who was seeing the film for the first time, with his father who must have been about the same age as me. The little boy was being comforted by his father during the scary parts but would break out into applause when Superman rescued Lois Lane or Air Force One. It was really sweet. There were a few Supermen in the audience, the best of which I managed to snap from afar with his Lois Lane.
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