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Max Steiner Award 2013: James Horner in Vienna


Marian Schedenig

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  • 4 weeks later...

Can those who have attended 'Hollywood In Vienna' in past years possibly clarify something?

Website mentions "Evening attire is requested for the gala evening". How strictly is this enforced? Will smart casual suffice?

Thanks in advance for your help. I know it's a while away yet but others have asked me to find out.

APBez

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Considering how fast it sold out i'm glad i got my ticket. Still, i guess there will be special performance of the concert without the awards gala the day before to give more people the chance to experience this fabulous event.

I would recommend wearing a suit and tie but it certainly is not strictly enforced.

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I talked to a friend who has been there twice, and he said he saw all kinds of attire when he was there -- everything from very casual (T-shirt and jeans) to smoking and tuxedos. Maybe they've become stricter in recent years, so I guess I'll bring a suit just in case (but then I obviously also need a coat, since it will be chilly....I'll have to buy a bigger suitcase!).

I haven't ordered anything for this trip yet -- no airplane, no hotel etc. As I'm moving on to the Elfman concert in London right after this, I'm waiting to hear if anyone's in London on Saturday night. If so, I might fly out on Saturday. If not, I might just as well spend the Saturday in Vienna and then fly out on Sunday. It's a bit people-dependent.

Now that my John Williams/Boston Pops concert is off -- and probably also Krakow -- these two events become even more important highlights to look forward to.

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I might be in London on Saturday night - as long as I can find somewhere that doesn't take my shoes and force me to drink beer. I do have a ticket for the Elfman concert, so I would like to think that I would do myself the courtesy of turning up.

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They haven't become stricter. The dress code has been in place since the second concert in 2009, when they first presented the Max Steiner Award and started the whole red carpet business. No changes since then.

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I might be in London on Saturday night - as long as I can find somewhere that doesn't take my shoes and force me to drink beer.

Ha, ha....that was one of the highlights in Ghent last year! :)

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I'm still not sure if Horner limits himself on coinducting just the TITANIC suite and let David Newman do the rest or how to interpret the different conductor announcements. Maybe Newman is a more concert-experienced conductor (Horner usually does it with clicktrack in the studio), but i still would like to see Horner on his feet the whole evening - with Newman repeating his wonderfully assembled Goldsmith-concert as an encore. A man can dream!

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Not enforced at all, at least I haven't seen anyone actually checking it or throwing anyone out. Most people have suited up though. Me: Dress shirt, suit, no tie.

I wear anything resembling a suit at gunpoint - I think nice jeans/t-shirt/fleece is a casual, yet respectable look. I wear this at work (software developing), and I look really weird in a suit. A civilised evening film music concert doesn't seem grounds for 'black tie' requirements to me.

Don't even know where my tie is.

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I'm still not sure if Horner limits himself on coinducting just the TITANIC suite and let David Newman do the rest or how to interpret the different conductor announcements. Maybe Newman is a more concert-experienced conductor (Horner usually does it with clicktrack in the studio), but i still would like to see Horner on his feet the whole evening - with Newman repeating his wonderfully assembled Goldsmith-concert as an encore. A man can dream!

Horner doesn't use clicktrack.

Now that my John Williams/Boston Pops concert is off -- and probably also Krakow -- these two events become even more important highlights to look forward to.

You're not going to Krakow then?

Karol

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No, it doesn't look that way, Karol. My involvement in the festival was removed when a particular segment of the festival was withdrawn due to lack of funding. So I'll have to pay for everything myself now if I want to go, and I don't know if I have the budget for it. Plus there may be job offers looming ahead (and I've already booked a week away for Vienna and London). But we'll see. Maybe something will happen in the last minute that allows me to go.

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I'm still not sure if Horner limits himself on coinducting just the TITANIC suite and let David Newman do the rest or how to interpret the different conductor announcements. Maybe Newman is a more concert-experienced conductor (Horner usually does it with clicktrack in the studio), but i still would like to see Horner on his feet the whole evening - with Newman repeating his wonderfully assembled Goldsmith-concert as an encore. A man can dream!

Horner doesn't use clicktrack.

Of course he does. He just occasionally turns it off for longer emotional passages. This is at least my understanding from someone who actually sat in the booth of several of JH's recording sessions (obviously it's much too expensive to do a two-hour score without the aid of clicktrack for more challenging rhythmic sequences).

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Who knows? In the end, Horner may feel what he want, if the thing isn't in the can in a very short time, the studio will get antsy about the costs, so i wager there are many other factors than Horner's perfectionism.

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No Rocketeer? :(

They played that a few years ago, so I don't expect them to repeat it. But the final programme hasn't been announced yet (and won't be for a few months, I expect), so who knows.

I'm still not sure if Horner limits himself on coinducting just the TITANIC suite and let David Newman do the rest or how to interpret the different conductor announcements. Maybe Newman is a more concert-experienced conductor (Horner usually does it with clicktrack in the studio), but i still would like to see Horner on his feet the whole evening - with Newman repeating his wonderfully assembled Goldsmith-concert as an encore. A man can dream!

So far, each of the awardees has only conducted once piece, with the rest of the concert handled by the main conductor. The only exception was in 2009, when Nicholas Dodd did all the Bond stuff in the second half.
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Who knows? In the end, Horner may feel what he want, if the thing isn't in the can in a very short time, the studio will get antsy about the costs, so i wager there are many other factors than Horner's perfectionism.

Korngold was (at least to Brendan G. Carroll) famous for conducting without a click and always getting the timing right regardless. If Horner can do that, skipping the temp track could actually save money. ;)
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No Rocketeer? :(

They played that a few years ago, so I don't expect them to repeat it. But the final programme hasn't been announced yet (and won't be for a few months, I expect), so who knows.

>I'm still not sure if Horner limits himself on coinducting just the TITANIC suite and let David Newman do the rest or how to interpret the different conductor announcements. Maybe Newman is a more concert-experienced conductor (Horner usually does it with clicktrack in the studio), but i still would like to see Horner on his feet the whole evening - with Newman repeating his wonderfully assembled Goldsmith-concert as an encore. A man can dream!

So far, each of the awardees has only conducted once piece, with the rest of the concert handled by the main conductor. The only exception was in 2009, when Nicholas Dodd did all the Bond stuff in the second half.

Alan Silvestri not only conducted his Back To The Future Suite, he also conducted the song "Believe" from The Polar Express.

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Marian, you are surely not comparing Horner with Korngold, are you? That's like smearing a national monument. :whistle:

Horner can do Korngold and million other things as well!

Karol

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 4 months later...

A month before the event, things become clearer and below is the 3-day program prepared by the Hollywood in Vienna team.
http://jameshorner-filmmusic.com/hollywood-in-vienna-the-program/

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A month before the event, things become clearer and below is the 3-day program prepared by the Hollywood in Vienna team.

http://jameshorner-filmmusic.com/hollywood-in-vienna-the-program/

Your website is nice Mr. JamesHornerFilmMusic, but there's a pesky automated spam thing when you leave out the page. Watch out.

I'm still not sure if Horner limits himself on coinducting just the TITANIC suite and let David Newman do the rest or how to interpret the different conductor announcements.

Conducting a live concert is a quite different beast than doing it in a studio recording. I don't know about Horner of course, but I guess most film composers don't feel particularly at ease when conducting in front of a very large audience if they're not accustomed to it. So better avoiding to look foolish and let someone more experienced doing it. I remember Trevor Jones looking quite nervous and upset when conducting a whole concert of his music in Madrid back in 2006.

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Horner conducted LSO in concert last year, when at Titanic 3D Royal Albert Hall première.

I think the reason behind composers not conducting is that they might want to simply enjoy themselves.


As a first part, science-fiction will be celebrated:
Impressions of Space Mountain – Steve Bramson
Star Trek – Jerry Goldsmith and Michael Giacchino
Gattaca – Michael Nyman
Artificial Intelligence – John Williams
Independence Day – David Arnold
The second part will be tribute to James Horner and will contain suites and themes from the following films:
Titanic
Apollo 13
Star Trek
Avatar
A Beautiful Mind
Legends of the Fall
Braveheart

A.I. will be played too, and Goldsmith.. Sweet!

Karol

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Hopefully The Enterprise cue. That would be awesome.

A.I. is a mystery though. Where Dreams Are Born is quite obvious choice, but The Mecha World is much more s-f.

Karol

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Hopefully that and The First Contact theme which is also awesome being played live.

In fact why don't they play the Star Trek medley that Goldsmith arranged for his concerts? They can probably add Nemesis (preferably Final Flight) in there somewhere 'cause JG didn't added that when he's still doing concerts.

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Hopefully The Enterprise cue. That would be awesome.

A.I. is a mystery though. Where Dreams Are Born is quite obvious choice, but The Mecha World is much more s-f.

Karol

Probably they'll get Nadine Beiler again to sing For Always (not the first time she sung a Josh Groban song in that venue!):

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chuckster312, on 03 Sept 2013 - 5:12 PM, said:

In fact why don't they play the Star Trek medley that Goldsmith arranged for his concerts? They can probably add Nemesis (preferably Final Flight) in there somewhere 'cause JG didn't added that when he's still doing concerts.

Judging from their track record so far, the Trek suite will probably be an uneven mess of bits and pieces from Goldsmith's main title and various bits from the other scores, joined together with more or less hard edits between the pieces.
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Or: I'd love to have seen Max Steiner and James Horner oiled up together, their golden skin glistening in the candlelight.

They have that effect on you, huh?

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According to Sandra Tomek (the chief organiser), a new arrangement of An American Tail's Somewhere Out There will also be performed. Representing that tremendous animated film output.

Hopefully Jake's First Flight is Avatar's selection.

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  • 4 weeks later...

http://hollywoodinvienna.com/en

James Horner received the Max-Steiner-Award in Vienna last night. Has anyone been there, beside me? ;-) I can't believe I couldn't find any thread about that here... :)

Anyway, I was there and it was a very bizare experience. The concert - well, you can get some impressions of the concept of these concerts if you search for some youtube-videos related to "hollywood in vienna".

Although mentioned as a star guest and conductor, Horner didn't conduct any music at the pre-concert on thursday. Pretty disappointing. But during the second half of the programme I noticed someone just behind me, taking pictures of the concert (I sat in the last row of the balcony). It was James Horner! :-) He spend the last part of the concert standing in the aisle, watching the concert with his music. So I took the chance to get an autograph. Great experience - and typical for his shy and private personality. It sure was better than seeing him conducting his music ;-)

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Although mentioned as a star guest and conductor, Horner didn't conduct any music at the pre-concert on thursday. Pretty disappointing. But during the second half of the programme I noticed someone just behind me, taking pictures of the concert (I sat in the last row of the balcony). It was James Horner! :-) He spend the last part of the concert standing in the aisle, watching the concert with his music. So I took the chance to get an autograph. Great experience - and typical for his shy and private personality. It sure was better than seeing him conducting his music ;-)

This is awesome.

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It was an enjoyable concert. In the first part they played some music from s-f films: A short piece from Metropolis by Godfried Huppertz. We got to hear a Star Trek medley, consisting of snippets of different scores: Alexander Courage's theme with chorus, a snippet of Goldsmith's Enterprise cue and Voyager theme, Rosenman, Eidelman and they ended on the very end of Giacchino's end credits (the order is probably a bit off). Then they played Mychael Nyman's Gattaca and John Williams' soprano-led Where Dreams Are Born from A.I. (exactly the same as the album piece), which has been performed apparently for the very first time. Ildikó Raimondi's rendidtion was solid, but not exactly spectacular (probably a bit too strong). And the first part ended with the slightly abbreviated end credits from David Arnold's Independence Day. It lasted less than an hour. I liked it, but there was something missing - probably because so many of those pieces were quite short and it seemed slightly all over the place.

The second part was much longer (probably around 90 minutes and dedicated exclusively to Horner. They opened with his brilliant Universal fanfare, which I might even prefer to Goldsmith's, and then played a suite from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, which was basically the Courage material from the overture, seguing directly into the end credit material with the omission of Spock theme, sadly. Next, a piece was a from Braveheart which, at least partially, was taken from end credits (with solos on uillean pipes).

A slightly longer medley of themes presented the themes from Willow (main theme), A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13, The Mask of Zorro and The Rocketeer (fittingly ending on a rousing hornerian climax from that very score). Again, good stuff, but all the segments were really brief. The last short standalone film score piece of the evening was The Ludlows from Legends of the Fall.

What followed were two centrepieces of the evening - the longer suites from both Avatar and Titanic. The first one was actually very effective, using penny whistle (I thin) and flute solos, some interesting live percussion effects and chorus. I must be quite a challenge to perform this music live, given that the actual score had endless layers of synthetic effects and stuff like that. But it worked. They performed some bits from Jake's Flight, The Bioluminescence of the Night, Scorched Earth (just that Willow-like fanfare) and some passages from War (including that cool fanfare near the start which was recorded originally exclusively for the album). And then Titanic, which seems to be a variation on some of the suites performed before - Sissel's vocals performed by opera soprano (a very different kind of performance), Southampton segment with the actual chorus (sounds much better, trust me) and then it ended with what can be heard in the final suite on Back to Titanic album with two themes played contrapuntally (or very similar to that piece, anyway).

At that point Horner was to pick up the Max Steiner award and when he was approaching the scene, they were playing the Spider-Man theme. And here is a major disappointment - it was probably the only opportunity to hear it without all the synths and modern percussion. But you couldn't hear it, because the audience were clapping all the way through. What I can say, though, is that it is actually a very strong tune indeed, certainly among the best modern superhero themes (if not THE best).

Anyway, Horner is getting the award and gets emotional. Crying almost. And they call him "the finest contemporary composer" (I'm not sure I heard "one of") and "Vienna's son" (apparently hid dad is from there). And the endless applause. At this point it turned into too much of a drama and schmaltz. But then again, this show is called Hollywood in Vienna so maybe that's the point. In any case, Horner indeed seems to be a very quiet and shy person. But, from my experiences with meeting other musicians, they mostly all are.

Two of Horner's songs were also performed: one from An American Tale and one from Land Before Time (which was the final piece performed that evening). Both were extremely cheesy, especially the latter where the singer Deborax Cox was walking in between the aisles and at one point holding the composer by hand... You get the idea.

While it's easy to be cynical about Horner and his place among film music giants, especially with all the cheesy awarding ceremony, it realized how big of a part he played in formation of my film music tastes. There's no denying he's got quite an output and the concert clearly showed that he could be just as successful in a concert hall as Williams or Goldsmith. At least in terms of broad audiences' appeal.

All in all, an enjoyable evening. The playing was certainly competent and the musicians managed to convey that Hollywood swagger, which is not that obvious to achieve by a concert orchestra (not typically, anyway). Finally, I got to meet some fellow JWFans in person - Marian, ChrisAfonso, publicist. And some other people - Tim Burden (just briefly) and Thor (whom I will see again on Monday). Which was quite surreal, but really nice.

Pity there was no chance to get any autographs or pictures. A bummer, to be sure...

Oh and there is another thread dedicated to this topic, lemoncurd. You can find it here.

EDIT: I just read an audio stream of the concert will be available to listen from tomorrow.

Karol

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