Prom 34: 21st-Century Soundtracks – Robert Ames conducts the London Contemporary Orchestra

Volker Bertelmann
All Quiet on the Western Front
excerpts

The Echo Society
Postcard from Earth
excerpts

Hildur Guðnadóttir
Tár
excerpts

Anna Meredith
The End We Start From
excerpts

Son Lux
Everything Everywhere All at Once
excerpts

Colin Stetson
The Menu
excerpts
Tamar-kali

Shirley
excerpts
The Last Thing He Wanted
excerpts

London Contemporary Orchestra

Edith Bowman
presenter

Robert Ames
conductor

Film scores by Echo Society featuring Brendan Angelides and Rob Simonsen ], Bryce Dessner, Anna Meredith, Son Lux, Tamar Kali, Colin Stetson, Herdis Steffansdottir, Isobel Waller-Bridge, Hauschka (Volker Bertelmann), Echo Society featuring Brendan Angelides and Rob Simonsen , Hildur Guðnadóttir, Jung Jae Il, Jed  Kurzel, Max Richter and Jerskin Fendrix

Presented by Edith Bowman

London Contemporary Orchestra
Robert Ames

The opening piece Postcard from Earth (Echo Society, Brendan Angelides and Rob Simonsen) set up this Prom’s showcase of film and television scores from the past decade. Full of pumped-up brass and cataclysmic percussion with the volume turned up to max, it duly amazed the audience at the same time as raising well-worn questions about music that is specifically geared to be listened to while looking at something else. And with that in mind it was a big mistake to have set up a particularly vapid Seventies-style psychedelic projection on the Albert Hall ceiling to get us suitably zoned-out. It was like slo-mo strobe lighting and very irritating, with a nostalgic, druggy whiff of hippy happenings of yesteryear or yestercentury. It also admitted that film music does need the something-to-look at option. Another source of irritation was Edith Bowman’s introductions and attempts at audience interaction, telling us what to feel and how she feels about what she’s just heard, although, to mix metaphors, the ship has long sailed since Radio 3 went down that path.

Much of the music sounded as though it was written in the gap between melody and gesture, dependent on the narcotic or tension-raising repetitions of minimalism, portentous descending basslines, ponderous tempi and strainings for effect. It was almost as if you just needed to follow a stylebook telling you how. And it took its ambition very, very seriously, to the extent that it played for two closely timed hours without an interval, with an increasingly restless audience voting with their feet. 

Then to hear it again on iPlayer was a bit of a revelation. For a start you had the bloom of amplification without the overwhelming volume, and the music, not composed primarily for the concert hall, sounded more cohesive. Jung Jae Il’s score for the excellent Squid Game (Netflix), with its riff on ‘Jingle bells’, instantly conveys character and context with the deftest of means. Colin Stetson’s music for The Menu was almost wasteful with subtleties, while Max Richter’s On the history of daylight was a miracle of restraint. The film Tár may have divided opinion but the short extract ‘For Petra’ from Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score has the same sort of bleak melancholy that seeps through the tv series Trapped, music that combines orchestration and content to a rare degree, and there were significant tracks from Isobel Waller-Bridge (The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse) and Anna Meredith (The end we start from), all of them pieces that suggested character and story in the manner of the great film composers of the past. Robert Ames and the London Contemporary Orchestra were our efficient guides through the selection. This Prom is being broadcast on BBC4 on August 16.