When I was 13 years old, The Lord of the Rings movies had just come out, and they were the best things. Ever. My brother, Alex, got the first one on DVD for Christmas--our family's first DVD, as a matter of fact--and I was hooked. The story, the visual details, the music, and everything else caught a hold of my imagination. And, on said DVDs, I learned of the existence of Lord of the Rings concert productions which consisted of a screening of the film together with a live orchestra performing the score.
And I wanted to go to one. Oh, how I wanted to go to one.
Flash forward to now, almost a decade later. Tonight, I went to one! And here's what I learned: it's never a great idea to spend 10 years building anticipation for something. No matter how objectively amazing it is, it just won't be able to compare.
The first half of the show truly was spectacular: the orchestra performed beautifully and, after a momentary glitch at the beginning, the film played right along; they even included some fantastic special effects, in the form of real fireworks to complement Gandalf's famous ones at Bilbo's birthday party. There were a few slightly odd moments for me--I realized tonight that I've only ever seen the extended version of the film, for instance, since I didn't see it until my brother got the DVD, so big portions were missing--but I nonetheless couldn't get a smile off my face.
The intermission came, and proved to be the longest, most disappointing intermission of all time. 20 minutes, they announced. That benchmark came and went. Then 30. Around 40 they began stalling, polling the audience and having various competitions to appease the masses. It had been nearly an hour by the time the producers and director came out and announced, in Chinese and English, respectively, that the film synchronization between the conductor's screen and the big screen had failed, and that consequently the rest of the concert would be just that: a concert.
The conductor tried to play it off by focusing on the amazingness of the music and dedicating the second half to the composer, Howard Shore, but you know what? Howard Shore wrote that music for the movie, with the express and sole intention that they be played together. Around then, a good chunk of the audience decided it wasn't worth being a half hour late when they had work/school tomorrow, and left. We stuck around, and Brittany and I amused ourselves by trying to figure out what would be happening on the screen if the movie was still playing. She ended up leaving early, as did droves of other people; Rachel, Chialing, Samia and I stuck around until the end, after they'd performed the songs over the credit to perfection.
Seriously, the last two songs were brilliant: one soloist from America who'd been singing all along and had a fabulous range, then a Taiwanese lady who had an absolutely wonderful voice that came out of nowhere. Other highlights included being able to locate the lady playing chains for the Isengard scenes and (on a somewhat funny note, for me at least) hearing the Taiwanese men attempt to sing the portion of Moria that was recorded by a Samoan men's choir (yes, I know too much about this movie, but the Samoan men just had a very guttural tone to their voices which is hard to mimic!). They did a good job, don't get me wrong, just very different and less scary than the original.
And that's the biggest problem with a decade-long gestation period for something you really want to do/see: you build expectations based on what you do know, in this case, the original movie/score. And you really just can't compare the original to a live performance, no matter how amazing it is.
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