BBCSSO, 26/11/2022

Vaughan Williams : Scott of the Antarctic

Katie Coventry, mezzo-soprano

Women's Voices of the Glasgow Chamber Choir

BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

Martyn Brabbins

This was no regular concert, but a screening of Charles Frend's 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic, with a live performance of the Vaughan Williams film score.  It's a genre of concert that's been gaining popularity in the last decade or so, but I've mostly seen it used either with silent movies (Abel Gance's Napoléon comes to mind) or relatively modern blockbusters, usually with scores by John Williams, such as Star Wars or some of the Harry Potter films.  As was explained to us before the start, to do the same with Scott of the Antarctic was a particularly challenging exercise, because unlike modern digital soundtracks, where the three primary components (speech, sound effects and music) are effectively recorded on separate tracks, this only had a single track to hold all three, so separating out the music while leaving the rest intact was a thorny task indeed.  However, it's not every film that has a score by the leading British composer of that era.

Vaughan Williams would later take the film score and adapt it into his 7th Symphony, the Sinfonia antartica.  However, although they share material, symphony and film score are two very different things and, of course, when you're watching a film, you're not listening to a performance the way you would in a concert.  In the end, the symphony is the better piece, it's naturally more cohesive, and the effect of bleak desolation is even more pronounced, because it lasts longer.  Although that music is there in the film, it's actually used quite sparingly.  The two moments that really stood out musically were the first appearance of the aurora australis, and the terrible death march of the last days of the expedition.  The live orchestra, soloist and chorus sounded superb, although it was a good thing that they were showing the film with subtitles, because every so often the remaining soundtrack - notably the start of some of the later diary entries - would get a little submerged.

There's no arguing that Scott of the Antarctic is a masterpiece of British cinema, and that its status is due not only to the superlative acting and the striking cinematography, but also to the remarkable film score. It was a pleasure to hear it brought to the forefront so skilfully.  Now, somebody needs to do the same thing with Grigory Kozintsev's 1964 Hamlet, and its Shostakovich score!

[Next : 1st December]