Nottingham Soundstage Festival 2025. Various venues, 22 March to 05 April 2025, 5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.
Photo Credit: Neil Bennison.
Nottingham Soundstage Festival 2025. Various venues, 22 March to 05 April 2025,
5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff.
“Soundstage Festival 2025: a potent mix of music and the moving image.”
If you’ve ever sat through the closing credits of Star Wars, you’ll know that you can find out the names of the assistant accountants, rigging gaffers, apprentice machinists – even the latex foam lab supervisor. But no matter how hard you look, you won’t discover the names of the trumpeters who play that spine-tingling opening fanfare or the French horn player who melts hearts with the Princess Leia theme. Each storm trooper gets his moment of individual glory but all the musicians are just lumped together under ‘London Symphony Orchestra’.
It's easy to take film music for granted. In fact, if a film really grips us, it’s easy not to notice it at all. But just try watching your favourite blockbuster without the music and then say how excited or moved you feel.
One of the good things about living within striking distance of Nottingham over the last two weeks is that there has been no chance of ignoring the potent combination of music and the moving image. This year’s Soundstage Festival has been bigger and better than ever before and has featured just about every genre you can think of (and many you can’t) across the city in venues large and small. The theme has been Journeys, taking audiences across worlds, even galaxies – from long, long ago to the future and beyond.
The world of silent films
This year’s voyage of discovery was launched by Neil Brand, the ultimate expert about music and film and one of the world’s finest when it comes to improvising accompaniments to silent films. The theme of his Riding the Rails show was trains, starting with perhaps the most famous film made by pioneer brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière. It has become iconic: just an everyday scene at a train station in which a steam train pulls into the station from the distance, growing larger as it approaches the camera positioned near the tracks. Legend has it that those first audiences were so terrified by the realism of what they were seeing that they screamed and ran for safety. That bit is almost certainly publicity hype – but the effect must have at least quickened the pulses of those who had never seen anything like it before.
After that Neil Brand’s show divided between clips of spectacular train crashes (involving stunts so hair-raisingly dangerous that you wondered how people can’t have been seriously injured in the making) – and the full-length feature The General, starring Buster Keaton. For all of two hours Neil Brand played the piano, making it all up as the images filled the screen, insisting that only by improvising on the spot keeps the musical response fresh and engaging. Whether capturing the nail-biting excitement of chases across the roofs of train carriages or swooning with reunited lovers, the pianist plays a vital role in shaping the emotional and narrative experience of the films. It was only when the film had finished that the Lakeside audience noticed that Neil Brand had removed his jacket whilst never once pausing his playing – proving that the accompanist’s job is to keep the audience’s eyes on the screen…whilst performing magic at the keyboard.
Shackleton’s heroic expedition
The following day saw a meeting of old and new. And once again Neil Brand was there to introduce the BBC Concert Orchestra playing his score for a screening of the original Frank Hurley film of Shackleton’s 1914-16 Endurance Antarctic expedition. The film, especially when projected onto the Royal Concert Hall’s giant screen, is an astonishingly vivid portrayal of what was to turn out to be a legendary feat of heroism. The film beautifully captures the expedition’s preparations, such as the bonding of the crew with their team of dogs. Even when the ship is stranded in thick ice the camera captures stunning images of the vessel against the Antarctic sky whilst the crew waits for liberation. Sadly that never arrives; instead Frank Hurley captures those agonising moments when the ice devours the ship, crushing its timbers, marooning the crew in the most hostile climatic conditions on earth - before their eventual rescue months later against the odds. Even though Hurley’s camera couldn’t capture the more harrowing moments, his film bears eloquent testimony to the limits of human endurance and heroic stoicism. Neil Brand’s music, played by the BBC Concert Orchestra and conducted by Hugh Brunt, sets the mood and enhances the audience response – whether to the playful antics of penguins or the awe-inspiring death-agonies of a ship being torn apart by pack-ice.
Student adventures in film and music
The BBC Concert Orchestra’s rich collaboration with the city’s university students was evident in the Journeys programme which followed. This featured 21 short films inspired by journeys of all kinds: travel, adventure, personal development, migration etc. There were train journeys, skateboarding acrobatics, moving stories of families facing uncertain futures in foreign lands and journeys from one stage of life to another. There were animations, experimental graphics, drawings which melted into each other, vivid adventures in colour and light, collages of images, computer-generated extravaganzas. And each 2-minute film was accompanied by an original score, again composed by the students themselves and skilfully synced to the images. It was a major achievement for all concerned: film-makers, composers, musicians – and conductor Hugh Brunt who had to co-ordinate everything and ensure a seamless link between a vast diversity of subject matter and style.
John Williams and E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
No celebration of music and the moving image would be complete without the film scores of John Williams. Even if some of the stories have started to look a bit dated now, his music is still as fresh as ever. And he’s probably done more than any other film composer to widen the appeal of the traditional symphony orchestra. The evening devoted to a screening of E.T The Extra Terrestrial (accompanied by the vast International Film Orchestra conducted by Matthew Hopkins) was an unforgettable experience, no matter how many times you may have seen the film before. Having the orchestra on stage spotlights the music without ever distracting attention away from the story. You notice how much John Williams must know his Wagner: all those leitmotifs ranging from E.T.’s vulnerable melody through the gentle, harp-led Friendship theme to the ominous, menacing motifs for the government men pursuing E.T. and his young protectors. And, of course, there’s the magical Flying Theme, which accompanies the iconic bicycle ride, the music providing the perfect launch-pad as the bicycle, E.T. and Elliott soar against the full moon. No wonder Spielberg decided to re-edit the film to match the power of the music’s ebb and flow. The International Film Orchestra played their hearts out and thrilled the RCH audience.
The Star Wars Saga
And the same can be said about the city’s resident orchestra, The Hallé, and the festival’s final big event: music from The Star Wars Saga energetically conducted by Stephen Bell and wittily presented by Tom Redmond. Even when the plots of the nine films occasionally sag, when there is perhaps one light-sabre battle too many, John Williams’ music always comes up trumps. The Hallé reminded us just how beautiful/awe-inspiring/menacing/heart-racing those themes are and how subtly colourful Williams’ use of a vast orchestra. The selection of music from that galaxy far, far away included the iconic Main Theme, with its stirring fanfares and sweeping strings, through the thrills of The Asteroid Field and The Duel of the Fates to the altogether gentler moods of the themes which evoke Yoda and Princess Leia. And if anyone amongst the four generations of fans present in the Royal Concert Hall was dismayed to find that Darth Vader’s Imperial March was missing from the printed programme, they would have been relieved to find it emerging as the perfect encore.
And so much more…
These are a few personal snapshots of an extensive festival. There was much else besides: the infectious energy of the Bollywood Brass Band, for instance, or the outdoor amphitheatre concert by the lake in University Park by musicians from the Robin Hood Youth Orchestra. There was the inspirational mix of original music with epic visuals of the Unlocked event presented by the inclusive Able Orchestra Pioneers – and a special edition of Friday Night is Music Night featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra. There were local events such as the Lunchtime Movie Singalong; a moving film-plus-music history of Nottingham’s Ukrainian community and Let’s Make a Soundtrack for families and the BBC Concert Orchestra. There was even Press Start, a hugely enjoyable musical journey through favourite video games – including live gaming to jazz band accompaniment. I could go on: there were 20 events altogether across 8 venues, all involving a huge number of people of talent, energy and vision. And co-ordinating them all was Neil Bennison, the Royal Centre’s Music Programme Manager. For him, and for everyone else involved, the 2025 Soundstage Festival has been a triumph.
Nottingham Soundstage Festival 2025 at venues including Royal Concert Hall, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham Contemporary Gallery, Metronome, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham Trent University, Ukrainian Cultural Centre, The Carousel.
Festival co-ordinator: Neil Bennison