The Romantic Hollywood series was a dose of reel love as Dewan Filharmonik Petronas celebrated music from the movies.

IT’S not too much of an exaggeration to say that every great Hollywood movie is, at its heart, a great love story. And every great love story needs its great love music. Which is why it’s such a surprise, then, that film music composers still get so little credit.

Take, for example, the story of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s “star-cross’d lovers”. One of the most famous love stories of all time, the play inspired a number of films, including Franco Zeffirelli’s luminous version from 1968. One of the film’s many outstanding features is the love theme – tender yet prescient of the lovers’ impending tragedy, it is in indelible part of the movie and rightly considered one of the greatest pieces of love music ever written.

Yet, its composer, Nino Rota, is not a name you’d normally associate with this film and neither would he would be remembered for the outstanding music he also wrote for the first two Godfather movies. In fact, many of the composers featured at the recent Romantic Hollywood concert series (Feb 4-5) at the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas in Kuala Lumpur would be truly unfamiliar to the audience; the music, however, proved otherwise.

The concert, on Feb 5, opened with the Franz Waxman’s suite from the 1954 film Prince Valiant. Heavy on brass and percussion, it is typical of the grand, action-packed scores of early Hollywood. Lead by guest conductor Richard Kaufman, the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra’s rousing start to the programme actually belied the romance that was to follow – Rota’s Romeo And Juliet love theme and Maurice-Alexis Jarre’s magical Lara’s Theme from Dr Zhivago.

Pure bliss: Many of the composers featured at the recent Romantic Hollywood concert at the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas were unfamiliar to the audience; the music, however, proved otherwise.

This was followed by the first of two compositions from Max Steiner, one of the earliest composers to write for film.

Like many of his musical pioneers in Hollywood, Steiner had a classical music background, counting Brahms and Mahler as among his teachers and was the godson of Richard Strauss. He received an astonishing 24 Academy Award nominations and won three Oscars in his long career.

The concert featured music that Steiner wrote for Gone With The Wind and, after the interval, Casablanca, both of which, incidentally, didn’t win him any Oscars. The Three Dances from Gone With The Wind was sparkly and upbeat, while the suite from Casablanca was unforgettably evocative – you could almost smell the bazaar in the music – and featured excerpts from the film immortal signature tune, As Time Goes By.

More crowd favourites followed, including Alex North’s Unchained Melody from Ghost, Lee Holdridge’s love theme for Splash, Tchaikovsky’s waltz from Sleeping Beauty (which provided the tune for Once Upon A Dream), Georges Auric’s Roman Holiday and John Barry’s Flying Over Africa from Out of Africa – all mesmerising and nostalgic in their own ways.

In between, Kaufman slipped in less familiar but no less interesting music – Leonard Bernstein’s haunting love theme from On The Waterfront, his only foray into film music, Lerner and Loewe’s Gigi suite, as well as Rachel Portman’s mysterious music for Chocolat – and, since love comes in all shapes and sizes, there was even time for Marc Shaiman’s Tango from Addams Family Values, a celebration of the love between Gomez and Morticia Addams.

The encore, Jacques Offenbach’s lively can can Galop used in Gaîté Parisienne, just ensured that it was, in all, a most pleasant day at the concert.

DFP took the initiative of screening stills from the movies at the back of the stage during the show, which, the odd misspelling aside, was a very nice touch.

Kaufman, making his fourth appearance at the DFP, was his usual congenial self, taking time to share his passion for the music he and the orchestra were performing.For me, and for many in the audience too, it was a chance to relive some of the best memories that Hollywood has given us and better appreciate the composers behind the music. If it made me go back and dig up my copies of Romeo And Juliet, Casablanca and Addams Family Values for a trip back to the past, then, I guess, the concert’s done its job.

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