Blue Planet set to wow Arena
THE award-winning Blue Planet TV series comes to life at the M.E.N. Arena on Thursday with a specially-edited two hour show presented on a screen that, at 18m wide and as high as a three-storey building, will be one of the largest screens ever used in the country.
There'll also be live orchestral accompaniment from a 76-piece orchestra and the UK-based choral ensemble Canzonetta.
The Blue Planet Live will be conducted by award-winning composer George Fenton, who has won BAFTA, Emmy and Ivor Novello awards for his score for the original series and has also been nominated five times for Oscar and three times for Golden Globe awards.
Palme d'Or
Fenton's recent film scores include The History Boys and Ken Loach's The Wind that Shakes The Barley, winner of this year's Palme d'Or. He also composed the music to the BBC Planet Earth series.
The orchestra is Manchester Camerata, and this unique show also features BBC broadcaster Dianne Oxberry narrating the magical underwater journey of the hit BBC Natural History series.
Best known for her weather-forecasting days on BBC North West Tonight, Dianne spent eight years working as a radio broadcaster on BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 1 with Steve Wright and Simon Mayo.
"We've done the show in other parts of the world and it has an amazing effect when people see and really engage emotionally with the incredible footage on this scale. We play live as an orchestra and a choir in this specially-arranged programme underneath the screen.
"It's pretty good fun," he laughs. "The audience generally will find it just an awesome thing to see and it's an especially great thing for a younger audience to see, because there's no computer-generated images here, it's all for real.
"You're actually there in the water with the killer whales and you get this immediacy on a massive scale that you just can't get anywhere else. It's hard work but I really love doing it."
Another thrill, he maintains, is the chance possibly to introduce people to live orchestral music.
"Without realising it, a lot of people who love film and film music love orchestral music," he points out.
Highbrow
"But they would never go to a concert because it's 'not their kind of thing' or 'their kind of crowd'. So this is a way to see an orchestra work and at the same time not have to feel as if it's some kind of highbrow experience."
Personally, he "never gets tired of seeing these fantastic images". But how does he start marrying the images with music?
"You always respond to the picture," he emphasises. "That makes you think how the music will express something about what the film-maker is trying to say.
"It's an interesting artifice because, although we have background music all the time, we don't have music scoring our lives. Yet that happens all the time in films. The point of the artifice is to get you into the reality. Music speaks to us in a way nothing else can.
"When I was asked to write the music for Blue Planet, I imagined footage which would be awesome, terrifying and magnificent. It is all of these things, but my lasting impression and for me the greatest achievement is that by a spectacular mix of scientific knowledge and dramatic flair, the films actually manage to make the oceans feel as natural a habitat as the land.
"David Attenborough's commentaries are distinguished in their understanding, love of the subject and luckily for me, their musicality.
"It's a strange world, the deep, and, from a musical point of view, you tend to write music that is about what it would feel like to be in that submarine going down that deep."
Blue Planet Live! is at the M.E.N. Arena on Thursday, December 28. The show starts at 7.30pm. Tickets are priced at é26.50 (adults) and é19.50 (under 14). Family tickets (2 adults and 2 children) are available at é75. To book click here.
Published: Mon, 27 November, 2006
Comment on this article
You need to be logged in to comment. Login | Register