Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Takes On Final Fantasy

Baltimore Sun

There is a realm where Light Warriors roam, not to mention the likes of Lukahn, Kraken and Tiamat, a world with places called Gurgu Volcano and Melmond. In this strange and eventual universe can be experienced something known as Final Fantasy-- assuming you're into video games.

On Saturday night, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, joined by the Handel Choir of Baltimore, will explore this exotic territory in a program called "Distant Worlds: Music from Final Fantasy." That music will be accompanied by high-def video and stills from the game, which was created in Japan by Hironobu Sakaguchi and introduced to the U.S. nearly two decades ago. Several series of the game have been released over the years.

"It's high fantasy," says 23-year-old Eric Mulligan, who started playing the game when he was a kid. "It's a role-playing game where you control multiple characters in their battles. The games are not related by plot or even the fictional worlds they take place in, but they all include an extensive use of magic, and there are always creatures of some kind. Something is always threatening the whole world."

Final Fantasy, one of the most successful ventures in the video-game genre globally, owes at least some of its considerable appeal to the accompanying soundtrack, most of it composed by Nobuo Uematsu. "His music really adds a lot," says Mulligan. "It's very good stuff."

Mulligan will be at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall for the BSO presentation, which is a follow-up to last summer's popular presentation of "Play! A Video Game Symphony," which he also attended. "I wasn't even aware of the Final Fantasy concert until a classmate from high school messaged me via Facebook," he says. "I remember thinking, why didn't my dad tell me about it?"

That dad would be Greg Mulligan, a longtime violinist in the BSO. "I know very little about the Final Fantasy music," he admits. (His son has given him some pointers since.) "But I know this concert has been very successful in other places it has been performed. It seems to make people happy."

Arnie Roth, who is conducting the national tour of "Distant Worlds," will vouch for that. He was invited by the owner of the Japanese publisher of the game to lead the Final Fantasy-themed program in this country in 2005.

"I was the only one crazy enough to say I'd try it," he says. "I insisted on some caveats first, including a requirement that a certain amount of tickets had to be sold by a certain date. We sold out all 4,200 seats of the Rosemount Rosemont Theatre in Chicago well before the concert. From there, I'd say the rest is history."

Roth has led the Final Fantasy show with orchestras in Atlanta, Detroit, San Diego and, last Sunday, Dallas, invariably to packed houses. The conductor gives the credit for this success to Nobuo Uematsu, something of a pioneer who was one of the first to introduce orchestral and choral sound into a product that initially relied on synthesized music.

"If you are familiar with epic movie music scores, like those of John Williams ( Star Wars) and Howard Shore (Lord of the Rings), you have a sense of what his scores are like," the conductor says. "It's very cinematic music, and very melody-driven. Even when he's scoring a battle scene, it is done with the melody spinning out."

Uematsu has taken a page from Richard Wagner's use of leitmotifs -- themes tied to characters or objects -- in the epic opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. "He's got a whole Wagnerian thing going for all the main characters," Roth says, "and that, consequently, has endeared those melodies to Final Fantasy fans like crazy. They are in love with them in all of their permutations."

Eric Mulligan seconds that. "I know a lot of the music, and most gamers who go to the concert will know most or all of it," he says. "It's nice that it's being acknowledged as worthy of being given a performance by a major symphony orchestra."

Roth, who compares Uematsu's scores with the likes of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana and Gustab Holst's The Planet, reports that the Final Fantasy show routinely generates "huge cheering, like you've never heard at a classical concert. On the video games, the sound is compressed, but, with 150 performers live onstage, people are hearing all the fortissimos full force and all the whispering pianissimos. That's why I think this is such a revelation for gamers."

The gamers have been something of a revelation for Roth. "Most of them dress up. I see suits, even some tuxes," he says.

The BSO is encouraging people to come in costume as a favorite character from the video game. Last weekend, the Dallas Symphony held a costume contest as part of the show, but had only four takers.

Eric Mulligan won't be donning a costume to head to the Meyerhoff on Saturday -- "That's too involved," he says -- and, as a longtime classical music fan, he'll feel right at home there. Others drawn to the event by the Final Fantasy hook may be in for quite a discovery.

"This program gets a learned audience in terms of video games," says Roth, "but a virgin audience in terms of coming to hear a symphony."

Jeff Counts, the BSO's vice president of artistic planning, points out that the primary purpose of programming something like "Distant Worlds" is "getting to people who wouldn't normally consider us for their artistic enjoyment, getting them into the hall to experience live orchestral music. Shows like this have gone a long way toward doing that," Counts says.

At the Utah Symphony, where he previously worked, "Play! A Video Game Symphony" was performed to sold-out houses. "And 95 percent of the audience was new," Counts says.

Although smart orchestras make creative efforts to entice such newcomers to come back for regular classical concerts, just seeing fresh faces at a video-game extravaganza can be rewarding enough.

"It's fun to play for people who are passionate about the music," Greg Mulligan says, "whatever that music may be."

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