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The quest to find the wizard(The Irish Times Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) The original score for The Wizard of Oz ended up as landfill, but composer John Wilson has put the 'million-piece jigsaw' back together. He tells Arminta Wallace how he did it Once upon a time there was a film company. This company made many wonderful movies - especially musicals - which everyone loved. Then film fashions changed. The film company suffered a corporate takeover, and its new chief executive said it was very silly to have all that waste-paper sitting around taking up space. So all the scores from the movies were used as landfill for a golf course. It sounds like the plot for a piece of postmodern fictional spoof - but the sad thing about this story is that it's true. The film company in question is MGM; the scores are those of High Society and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as well as Ben Hur, Mutiny on the Bounty and just about every Judy Garland movie ever made, including the iconic The Wizard of Oz. The takeover was in 1969. And the bit about the music library being used to stuff a golf course is gospel truth. Happily, that's not the end of the story. Next week, Irish audiences will be able to see a new print of The Wizard of Oz with live accompaniment by the RTE Concert Orchestra. But where, you may ask, did they get the orchestral score? Enter John Wilson - composer, arranger, conductor and movie buff extraordinaire, who reconstructed it note by note, by listening to the movie soundtrack over and over and over again. "Basically, you listen," he says, his Geordie accent - for the record, he's a native of Gateshead - evident from the first vowel. "You start off by getting the basic shape of the thing down - the number of bars in a particular sequence. Then you write the tune down, then the bass line, and then you've got to fill in all the gaps bit by bit. It's like doing a million-piece jigsaw. It took me all of a Sunday one time just to get a second and a half's worth of music." Aren't there some fantastic eureka moments along the way? "Oh yes," says Wilson. "It's great when everything fits and it makes logical sense - when you find a nice clean and tidy way of doing something. But it's pretty miserable when it doesn't. Especially when you can't hear the stuff under dialogue." He adds that he and his friend Andrew Cotty, who helped with the reconstruction, were lucky. "We had the original soundtrack recording from the old days, before they put the dialogue on top." Wilson has been conducting music from the movies for about 10 years. "There was a trend a few years ago - I think it may have been Carl Davis who started it - of putting live orchestras to silent movies. Charlie Chaplin and things like that. Because those movies always had live accompaniment when they were done originally; there'd be a pianist or an orchestra. Then it grew into people giving performances of movies with a live score being played." THANKS TO A spanking new print, which features the original performances but not the orchestral score, this is the first time The Wizard of Oz has ever been performed in this particular way. For anyone who might find it difficult to imagine what the experience might be like, can Wilson describe it? "First of all you'll hear the score as you've always known it, with all the famous songs, exactly the same as it's always been," he says. "But you'll hear details in the orchestra which you're not really aware of when you're watching it on the telly or on a DVD, and it slightly alters your focus. It's a wonderful score. "There are things that you never hear normally in the music because it's so old and so scratchy. But when you hear it with a live orchestra you realise what a work of art it is, really." The trick, if it can be called that, is in a seamless blending of the recorded visual experience and the live aural one - which calls for almost superhuman levels of synchronisation between conductor and orchestra, on the one hand, and what's happening on screen on the other. The margin for error in performance is, according to Wilson, just an eighth of a second. "It's hell to match and make perfect," he says. "I've got a clock to help me out. It'll say 'three minutes 14 seconds: this happens'." SO BASICALLY HE just needs to keep one eye on the clock, one eye on the film and one on the orchestra? "It means lots of rehearsal, lots of trial and error and lots of me knowing every tempo to the nth degree. But I've worked with the RTE Concert Orchestra a lot and I'm quite sure we'll get it all done." Despite having watched The Wizard of Oz more times than he can count, Wilson hasn't tired of it - yet. "I love this film," he says. "It's a funny thing to be doing the live orchestra with the film, but the audience reaction when we did it in Liverpool last year was the most overwhelming I've had. It's a really thrilling evening - and I'm not just saying that because I'm partly responsible for it. This is a very special film. It's universal in its appeal, and it's got a strong emotional pull. The music's terrific. The orchestra love playing it. The audience love watching it. It all adds up to a terrific experience." A happy ending looks to be in store, then. For Wilson, however, there are a few more chapters still to come. "I'm working on Tom and Jerry at the minute," he says, "to give people an idea of how hard that music is to play. They're amazing scores. Amazing . . . " And he's off an another animated adventure. The RTE Concert Orchestra, conducted by John Wilson, performs the soundtrack to The Wizard of Oz with live screenings at The Helix from Dec 19 to 22, nightly at 8pm, with a 3pm matinee on Sat 22 Copyright 2007 Irish Times Ltd. , Source: The Financial Times Limited |