HOME ALONE IN CONCERT
Where: Royal Theatre, 805 Broughton St.
When: Saturday (7 p.m.) and Sunday (2:30 pm. and 7 p.m.)
Tickets: $48-$126 from the Royal McPherson box office (250-386-6121) or
Despite their complexity, film scores often come together in a piecemeal manner not dissimilar to how a pop song is written.
“It’s usually over the course of two to three weeks, little segments here, little segments there,” said Sean O’Loughlin, principal pops conductor for the Victoria Symphony. “The composer writes music as they go. It’s not like a symphony that is written all at once.”
The exception to this rule is John Williams, the iconic composer and conductor behind some of the most recognizable film scores in cinema history.
His music for films like Star Wars, Superman: The Movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park and E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial are nuanced mini-symphonies capable of standing on their own as musical entities. In fact, Williams is so adept at his craft, his 54 nominations for film music are the second-most in Academy Awards history.
The Los Angeles-based O’Loughlin knows this better than most, having started his career in Hollywood as a copyist and proofreader of film scores for a company whose clients included Williams. He has led the Victoria Symphony through performances of Williams’s work in recent years, and will do so once again this weekend with three performances of Home Alone in Concert, with the symphony providing live accompaniment to screenings of the film.
“This one touches a chord for a lot of people,” O’Loughlin said of Home Alone, whose score earned Williams an Academy Award nomination. “Obviously, it was a very successful film. But when you start peeling back the onion, you realize how brilliant this piece of music really is.”
The 1990 blockbuster about a resourceful eight-year-old boy from Chicago, accidentally left behind at Christmas by his Paris-bound family, bypassed the syrupy formula of Christmas films for a slapstick approach, one that had more in common with Keystone Cops and The Three Stooges than Frank Capra or Rankin and Bass.
Despite the manic pace, to the casual viewer, Williams’s score does not immediately jump off the screen — not when all eyes are fixated on star Macaulay Culkin. It’s a score whose gifts are revealed after repeated viewings, O’Loughlin said.
“It’s hard to believe it was written for a film, to be honest. There is such a sophistication to it. If you leave the film at home, this is a great, great piece of music. It’s pure magic.”
The adaptation being performed Saturday and Sunday at the Royal Theatre was created by Film Concerts Live, a U.S. company co-founded in 2013 by O’Loughlin’s former manager, Steve Linder. Scores to more than 20 films to be performed with live accompaniment are now in rotation, including Williams’s scores to E.T. and Jurassic Park.
In 2023, more than 60 orchestras worldwide performed the score to Home Alone in tandem with a screening of the film. “It’s become a trend in the symphony world,” O’Loughlin said.
“It’s a great way to get a newer audience for us, and expose them to the power and the beauty of the symphony orchestra sound. You get to feel the movie. It’s a very different experience from simply watching it on a screen, because you can see the musicians physically playing the music, which is part of the charm.”
More than 40 singers, including a local children’s chorus, will appear during the concerts this weekend, as Williams branched out with his score to Home Alone, incorporating everything from Christmas classics O Holy Night and Carol of the Bells to nods to The Nutcracker.
Those and other unique decisions made the role Williams played an essential one, according to O’Loughlin.
“I think we should do an anatomy of the scene where it shows the family racing to get out of the house but without the music. And then we could go back and say, ‘Now, here is what John’s music did for this.’ Because when you put the music in, it adds gravitas to it.”
