Music

The John Wilson Orchestra

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Keith Bruce

four stars

I HAD been misinformed on a couple of crucial points – the concert featured not a note penned by George Gershwin nor singer Louise Dearman – but it would be pointless to quibble, because music-making of this quality can follow its own script. The Hollywood scores here ranged from Korngold and Franz Waxman through to Michel Legrand and John Williams, and the singers were Kim Criswell, demonstrating a fine facility with the back catalogue of Barbra Streisand, and regular favourite with the band Matthew Ford.

The theme of conductor John Wilson – unmistakably the box office attraction from his reception on stage – was Academy Award-wining film music. Hence his nod to Williams, an arrangement not listed in the programme, who has now overtaken Alfred Newman as the screen's most Oscar-nominated composer. It was Newman, however, who kicked things off with the Fanfare he wrote for 20th Century Fox and instrumental music from 1953's Monroe/Bacall/Grable vehicle How To Marry A Millionaire.

The Wilson Orchestra is a wonderfully-assembled machine, with a big band incorporated into its symphonic proportions, and the players and conductor are the real heroes of the show – as the brass guys posing for photographs in the bar at the interval clearly know. They prove equally adept backing Ford in Billy May and Nelson Riddle arrangements as they are with the 1930s orchestral scores for The Adventures of Robin Hood and Gone With The Wind. On the other side of the stand there are wind players who handle single and double reed instruments to the same end.

Two of the percussionists stole the show, however, adding smashing crockery, anguished cries, snoring and bubble wrap to Wilson's own arrangement of Scott Bradley's music for Tom & Jerry cartoons.