Omen II

I’m available for weddings, funerals and bat mitzvahs. P.S. That looks very much like a jackdaw, not a raven. Know your corvids!

I would recommend the recording by Hilary Hahn with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under David Zinman. The concerto is paired with Leonard Bernstein’s Serenade, a piece I have never been able to get into, but you cannot go wrong with the LVB.

Could you be thinking of the live recording with Lalo conducting the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra?

I predict a Cinderella Liberty expansion featuring both the film tracks and the album recording. I reckon it will include a booklet containing notes, recording dates and thanking various people for doing unspecified things. I will buy it.

Ruby or tawny?

I have an ecru coloured polo neck jumper (that’s a beige turtleneck sweater if you’re American) for cold days. My brother told me it makes me look like the U-boat captain in The Land that Time Forgot.

I agree with Karol, this was really fantastic. I went to the evening performance, which was slightly delayed starting due to a fault with the small screen which displays the punches and streamers in front of conductor Ludwig Wicki. Luckily, they got it working eventually (if in doubt, switch it off then switch it back on again) but it made me wonder if it would have been even possible to continue without it! I suspect that for a complex score with lots of action music such as The Force Awakens, it would have been nigh on impossible. The Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra (including eight horns!) did such a great job. I had started my Saturday by taking part in the parkrun at Black Park (next to Pinewood Studios), so it was nice to end the day by seeing bits of it on the big screen from the comfort of a second tier box.

I had a bit of a near miss / lucky escape on Saturday. I had travelled from London to Halifax to watch my team play FC Halifax Town in the first round of the FA Cup - we often seem to struggle against teams from lower divisions, but managed to prevail 2-0 reasonably comfortably (it certainly helped that my team scored in the second minute). The train on the way back from Leeds to London King's Cross was surprisingly quiet, partly due to some planned engineering works further up the East Coast mainline and partly because there were not too many teams playing in that area on Saturday, which means fewer football supporters on the trains on Saturday evening. The journey had been completely uneventful and I was looking forward to getting back to London at a reasonable time once we had left the last scheduled stop, Peterborough, at about 8 p.m. However, about ten or fifteen minutes later the train came to a gradual stop - not an unusual occurrence, so I just expected the train to start moving again eventually. After another ten minutes, the train manager spoke on the tannoy to apologise for the delay, adding that he was trying to find out what was causing the delay and why we had stopped. I checked on Google Maps and saw that we were just a short distance north of Huntingdon station in Cambridgeshire. After another ten or fifteen minutes of waiting, the train manager came back on the tannoy to explain that the train would not continue its journey to London and would be reversed back up the line to Peterborough due to an incident just ahead of us at Huntingdon station. A few of the passengers were speculating that maybe someone had jumped in front of a train, but a member of LNER staff walking through the carriage said that if there had been a fatality, they would have said so, therefore it must be something else. Shortly afterwards the driver walked through the carriage towards the other end of the train and we eventually started moving back the way we had just come from towards Peterborough. A girl in my carriage (coach J) then announced that she had just seen on her phone breaking news on the Sky News website that multiple people had been stabbed on a train at Huntingdon station. It turned out that we were on the LNER train immediately behind the LNER service on which a man had run amok, stabbing ten other passengers a few minutes earlier. The attacker had boarded that train at Peterborough in coach J. Had he been a few minutes later and missed that train, he might well have been on the same train as I was and in the same carriage. I eventually made it home after 1 o'clock in the morning, eight hours after I had left Halifax. It just struck me as one of those 'sliding doors' moments, so I thought I would share here. Have you had any near misses or lucky escapes?

John Williams scored Flashing Spikes, a 1962 episode of Alcoa Premiere directed by John Ford, no less. It starred Jimmy Stewart and was about baseball. Here it is:

Look what Jazzy received in the post today! Those proportions are correct.

While neither of these is exactly unknown, two of my favourite Ennio Morricone scores which neither you nor Tom have mentioned are Cefalonia and Frantic. The former was written for an Italian TV movie about the Italian Acqui division which elected to fight the Germans on the occupied Greek island during WW2. Every track on the album is top drawer Morricone and very listenable, even the suspenseful / militaristic stuff. There is no cliched bouzouki music at all, in case you were worried as a proud Greek. The score for Frantic, Roman Polanski's thriller starring Harrison Ford whose wife disappears while they are on a trip to Paris, is very different in tone. Morricone somehow conjures the real Paris for me better than any French composer, with brilliant bass guitar playing from Nanni Civitenga in several tracks. It's a great film too, not least because of the memorable performance by Emmanuelle Seigner.

I’m disappointed to learn that Midway isn’t 50% into the book. 😔

I like his Starsky and Hutch theme, even if it is less well remembered than Lalo Schifrin’s original and Tom Scott’s classic.

While this news does not surprise me given Lalo’s great age and his frail appearance in recent years, I am very sad to hear it nonetheless. He was one of my absolute favourite film composers. I am grateful to have seen him in concert in London back in 2007 - a great musician and a lovely man.

No, it’s in Paris, not Nice.