Music / live soundtrack
Review: Arcadia (live), Bristol Beacon@St George’s
To the strains of Jerusalem a vintage BBC voice intoned: “there’s nowhere else like it on Earth”. That soundbite cropped up many times on the soundtrack of Arcadia, Paul Wright’s fast-paced collage of archive film clips exploring the British people’s relationship to their land. The first time you heard it the phrase rankled, suggesting some kind of exceptionalism, but as the film’s hectic narrative unwound from pagan ritual to rave’s tribalism it became clear it simply meant how peculiar the whole business had always been. And with COP 27 under way in Egypt any message of our essential need for a respectful relationship with the land at our feet could not have felt more relevant.
Arcadia: Adrian Utley (guitar), Ross Hughes (conductor) (Photo: Tony Benjamin)
This isn’t meant to be a film review, excellent though the movie was, because this screening had a live musical soundtrack provided by a 9-piece ensemble led by Will Gregory and Adrian Utley, the score’s composers. Their original recording had been an eclectic collage of musical styles and instrumentation, matching the films unsettling flow of contrasting ideas. It seemed implausible that so compact a group of musicians could replicate it in real time but it was evident from very early on that they could – and would – as jaunty bucolic folk themes darkened with sinister electronic undertones and rich string harmonies ushered in Moroder-style synth pulses.
Arcadia: Lisa Knapp (vocal), Drew Morgan (cello), Will Gregory (keyboards/vocal). (Photo: Tony Benjamin)
Being shrouded in darkness obscured which of the various multi-instrumentalists was playing at any one time, though Adrian Utley’s moment of acoustic guitar clarity ushering in Lisa Knapp’s spellbinding rendition of the folk song Lowlands was one high point (albeit soon displaced by a burst of glam rock). At times ethereal choral waves swept through over rich orchestrations and it was often hard to believe there were only nine players on the stage. A shimmering sound like a theremin rose above: was it electronics or opera singer Victoria Oruwari’s remarkable voice? Full credit must be given to the sound engineer for gathering such disparities into something balanced and whole.
is needed now More than ever
Arcadia (Photo: Tony Benjamin)
Tasked with replicating the original score musical director Ross Hughes had apparently been faithful to it but it’s doubtful anyone not on stage would have been able to tell. What mattered was that it all worked, sound and image combining into something entirely consistent with itself to convey the film director’s original intentions. It was often hard to concentrate on the music alone as it was so impeccably interwoven with the film itself, yet the added sense of urgency of a live performance certainly intensified the whole experience in a very special way. It was a fine achievement, and if at times it may have seemed a quixotic project to those involved this memorable evening had more than justified their creative efforts.
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