As host of the Swedish film review programme in the 1990s and 2000's, Orvar Säfström was well known to audiences across the country. He was frequently invited to present concerts of film music which seemed to him to contain all the same material, re-used by orchestras year after year. Finally, in 2006, he was invited by Malmö Symphony Orchestra to create his own concert. Taking an idea from a concert he had heard about in Los Angeles, “Dear Friends”, he suggested they perform a concert of game music. That summer, the orchestra put on their first production of symphonic video game music to a Malmö audience of 20,000. Orvar’s company, Underscore Productions, is now 11 years old and the producer works with orchestras across Scandinavia. Now, he’s even talking to several orchestras outside the region. Bachtrack caught up with him...
AK: What are the unique selling points of your concerts?
OS: We sell a complete package to a pro orchestra (either large or small scale). It includes everything from scores and cleared rights to performance licenses, artwork and press releases. For the actual production we have a producer on-site for the rehearsals and media work and typically I host the concerts. We bring proven concepts and a genuine knowledge of the audience. Apart from our popular game music concert Score we also create productions based on a specific theme rather than one type of media. An audience in love with science fiction, for example, will be open to music from all kinds of sources of that genre. A sci fi film and a sci fi TV series obviously have a lot more in common than two films like Schindler’s List and Predator.
We don’t use video projections like some producers, and initially the orchestras can be worried the audience will want more of a spectacle. We’ve found, however, that what this audience want most is for their music to be taken seriously.
Concerts like this are usually meant to bring in a new audience. Another common way is to invite a popular vocalist from popular music. If an orchestra brings in a well known singer you can pack the house, but the musicians just become a backing band. With us the orchestra becomes the star. In fact at a Norrlands Orchestra concert, an older member of the orchestra told me, “I’ve been playing orchestral music for 40 years and this is the first time I felt like a rock star!” We try to get the orchestra to programme this alongside their other events so some of their regular audience will attend as well as a new audience. That crossover is just as important as the orchestra meeting a new crowd. We take care of them all by having the presentations explain to the regulars what’s coming up next and we acclimatise the new audience to the conventions of a concert.
Why do you call yourself a producer? Surely the music you being played has already been composed.
Well, firsty of all I consider myself a concert producer. But when we talk about the music, other than John Williams music where the scores we can rent are great, we find that many rental scores that exist for film and TV music are rubbish and we do better putting together suites with our own orchestrators. We often work with the original composers too. And if we’re using more recent music it really has to be re-orchestrated by us as it was composed for use in a studio with heavy post-production and mixing. It would sound very odd if the original scores were played live. Also for our game music concerts, a lot of the older music is electronic and needs to be interpreted into orchestral scores.
Can you give us some examples of before and after for some of the music in one of your productions?
The Legend of Zelda - “Dungeon Theme”
The original is quite a simple melody, a loop of about 20 seconds long. Here is the same theme in our orchestration: