Music / Reviews
Review: There Will Be Blood Live, Colston Hall
Esteemed Chinatown and Total Recall composer Jerry Goldsmith once noted that the string section was more important to him than anything else. It was a principle born out in the electrifying live performance of Jonny Greenwood’s There Will Be Blood score at Colston Hall, the London Contemporary Orchestra extracting a remarkable array of textures and tones from its ensemble of violins, violas, celli and double bass.
The movie itself needs little introduction. Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling, broiling, turn of the century epic is loosely inspired by socialist Upton Sinclair’s tome Oil! but in reality it’s a tortured beast entirely of Anderson’s own creation. Bestriding the movie is Oscar winning colossus Daniel Day Lewis, shading his monstrous prospector Daniel Plainview with notes of raging sociopathy and (very) fleeting compassion.
Adding to the film’s Kubrickian atmosphere is Greenwood’s score; not a soundtrack of landscape, character or theme but of elemental, impending catastrophe, God’s string section filtered through hellfire. It’s a fascinating, compelling work done justice by the LCO’s robust and powerful performance under the baton of conductor Hugh Brunt.
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Playing against a projection of the film itself, the orchestra never missed a beat, every tremolo and pizzicato string playing right to the heart of Plainview’s journey towards greed and destruction. From the eerie, gliding violins of Greenwood’s own Popcorn Superhet Receiver (heard at the very start and at certain key points throughout) to the incorporation of staples by Arvo Part and Brahms (the latter one of the few pieces drawing on the brass section), the live orchestral performance only served to reinforce the importance of Greenwood’s score to the movie.
It also reinforced one of the most undervalued facets of film scoring: brevity and economy. For a two and a half hour movie there are barely 50 minutes of score in it, with carefully judged periods of silence heightening the impact of the music when it does arrive. Bolstered by the outstanding solo contributions from Cynthia Miller on ondes martenot, Gayla Bisengalieva on violin and Oliver Coates on cello, it was a striking and memorable live soundtrack experience that invested an already astonishing score with fresh energy.
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