Night at the movies is a crowd-pleaser

HALLE ORCHESTRA Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
CONDUCTOR Carl Davis leapt into last night’s concert with a flourish.

He waltzed on stage with his trademark glitzy costume and directed the orchestra straight into the 20th Century Fox Fanfare to introduce an evening at “The Movies” without the screen.

This romp through film music through the ages brought much-loved tracks from films made into stage shows and stage shows made into films to a packed audience.

There was everything from “New York, New York”, the Cole Porter classic “Kiss Me Kate” and music from recent film “Black Swan” to the blockbuster “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl”.

It evoked images of Johnny Depp’s swashbuckling Captain Jack Sparrow, to John Hurt’s Bob Champion, in the film “Champions”, which told the true story of the jockey’s battle against cancer. The music had the audience in turn riding the high seas in a pirate ship then brought firmly back to earth in poignant thoughts for the sportsman whose brave spirit saw him fight on to win the 1981 Grand National on Aldaniti.

With talent can come eccentricity, and Davis, as much at home chatting to his audience as teasing the best out of this world-class orchestra, certainly has a strain of that.

But there is little of the eccentricity in the razor-sharp performance of this truly talented set of musicians.

Gareth Small performed a spine-tingling trumpet solo in Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”, plucked from the gritty northern film “Brassed Off”, which followed the fortunes of Grimley Colliery Brass Band and its conductor, played by the late Pete Postlethwaite.

And timeless feelgood favourites included “Singing in the Rain” and “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” which accompanied Paul Newman’s bicycle ride with Katharine Ross in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”.

Yet another wonderful concert of popular music from the Halle Orchestra.