Let the brass blare, and the drums roll.
“Star Wars: A New Hope,” the original blockbuster that engendered a film franchise that has enchanted generations of movie lovers, comes to the Blaisdell Concert Hall for three screenings this weekend. It’s just in time to refresh your memories from a tale that started “a long time ago” — it went on limited release on May 25, 1977 — and concluded just last month with “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”
The three performances promise to be a “tour de Force” (insert groan here), with John Williams’ award-winning music performed by the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra, conducted by former symphony timpanist Stuart Chafetz, an expert film-score conductor and Williams’ fan.
“I love it,” Chafetz said in a phone call from the San Francisco Bay Area, where he now makes his home. “It resonates with so many people, and I can relate to that in such a strong emotional way. Just conducting John Williams tribute concerts, where there’s just the orchestra playing his music, that’s more than enough, but when you have the ‘live-to-film,’ where there’s the orchestra playing live to the film, it’s a whole ’nother level of intensity.”
Featuring grand flourishes, delicate themes, bombastic marches and even a snappy jazz dance, “Star Wars” music has entered into the pantheon of great orchestral music, with some commentators heralding it as the most influential film score in film history. According to the website udiscovermusic.com, nothing less was expected from Williams when filmmaker George Lucas approached him to score the film. (Williams had been recommended by fellow filmmaker Steven Spielberg, for whom Williams scored “Jaws.”) Lucas showed Williams a cut of the film set to Beethoven, Bach, Tchaikovsky and other great composers, challenging him to write an all-encompassing soundtrack of equal measure.
Williams responded with a score reminiscent of many great composers. Indeed music experts hear references to them throughout, such as Wagner in the use of short melodies, or leitmotifs, to identify particular characters; Stravinsky, whose “Rite of Spring,” used in the dinosaur scene in “Fantasia,” likely inspired the eery music used in the desert landscape of Tatooine; Elgar, whose “Pomp and Circumstance” is recalled in the award ceremony music; and Erich Korngold, a film score composer of the 1930s-50s who wrote for adventure films like “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Sea Hawk.”
“These composers, they steal from each other all the time,” Chafetz said with a laugh.
ONE TUNE that can be considered Williams’ own is “Cantina Band,” the jazz tune heard in the bar. According to udiscovermusic.com, Lucas told Williams to “imagine several creatures in a future century finding some ’30s Benny Goodman swing band music in a time capsule or under a rock someplace … how they might attempt to interpret it.” Williams, a jazz pianist before turning to film composing, obliged with the engaging frolick.
Interestingly, “Cantina Band” is the one piece that will not be performed by the symphony. Along with the voices, explosions, marching boots, swoosh! of light sabres and other sound effects in the film, the song is integrated into the soundtrack of the film, even versions that are used in live-music screenings.
For the rest of the film, Chafetz will lead the symphony in the orchestral music, keeping close track of the proceedings using a small monitor on his podium. He and the musicians will also wear headsets transmitting a “click track” to them to keep them synched up with the imagery.
“It’s very intense,” Chafetz said. “When these sound tracks were designed, it was designed for one minute of music, that’s a take, then stop and redo it, then go to the next take. But what’s happened now is that they’ve made it completely a concert performance which is actually that much harder for musicians. … You just have to keep moving, when you’re performing these live concerts.”
AT LEAST one symphony musician is feeling the force of Williams’ score. Principal French hornist Anna Lenhart, a big fan of film scores and Williams’ music in particular, is planning to wear “Princess Leia buns” — the Cinnabon- like haircut that Carrie Fisher wore in the film — for the concert.
“I have little hair accessories that you twist your hair around,” said Lenhart, a symphony musician for two years. “We’re also hoping that Stuart’s going to let us wear costumes. … If they let me wear one, then I have a white dress and a spacey-looking belt.”
Lenhart will get to solo on some of iconic melodies in the “Star Wars” score, such as the Luke Skywalker theme and the Force theme. “John Williams in particular knows how to write well for French horns, and he gives us a lot of the melodies,” she said. “It’s always really funny, because the string players are working so hard, and no one can hear them. … We appreciate having all the heroic moments.”
Lenhart’s attraction to “Star Wars” goes back to her childhood growing up in Idaho. She was born after “A New Hope” was released, but she remembers watching it on VCR as a child.
“When I was a kid, I would annoy my siblings by rewinding and watching a scene over and over again and again,” she said. “I never knew why, and then when I watched them as a kid I realized it was because there was a horn theme in the background.”
While this episode in the “Star Wars” tale is called “A New Hope” — a title given after the initial success guaranteed that the series would continue, Chafetz and the orchestra have their own hopes for the production — that they “disappear” into the film.
“I always think it’s the best compliment when people go ‘You know what? I almost forgot there was an orchestra,’ which means that we lined up with the way it would while actually watching the movie,” Chafetz said. “That means we’re doing our job.”
“STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE”
With live music performed by the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stuart Chafetz
>> Where: Blaisdell Concert Hall
>> When: 7:30 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday
>> Cost: $27-$89
>> Info: 800-745-3000, ticketmaster.com
