I went tonight to the first-ever video game music concert played by a real orchestra (Walt Disney Philarmonica I think it was), in the whole USA. It's also the first concert in North America from Square-Enix. It was called "Dear Friends. Music from Final Fantasy."
It was good.. pretty good. They has some huge monitors that would show zoom-ins of the musicians, but also scenes from the games while the appropriate music/theme was playing. The concert opened with the Fithos-Venusec (probably slightly mispelled) theme from Final Fantasy 8 and I can tell you, that seeing a whole chorus of people singing the chorus part was wow. They also played the Zanarkand piano theme w/violins while they played the first "sending" of souls of Yuna (from the game) and it was simply breathtakingly emotinoally beautiful.
Nobuo Uematsu ("da man" that has made this beautiful music) was not directing the concert, he was watching it though he was part of the public. I went to the concert with my ex, and by sheer hand of fate, Nobuo's wife was sitting right in front of us along with his parents (Nobuo was sitting kind of more like in the middle of the auditorium - why? I dunno).
It happens that the main character artist (Yoshitaka Amano) and Hironubu Sakaguchi (designer? Bak in FF1 was president of Square, don't know about now) was there too, and all said things through a Japanese translator.
It was pretty cool. You could tell that if Nobuo ever decided to point at someone and say "kill" that person would be dead.
Speaking of which, this was one of the highest concentrations of nerd-types I have seen in a long long time. I was one of them of course, so this is just an observation, not an insult. Even higher than GDC.
When we left, the parents of Nobuo were actually telling several people (including us) "thank you" while bowing. Hmm... I didn't know what to do... it should be me doing the bowing. From what I have seen the bowing goes both ways, but seirously... no idea what to do :-)
"So Raist, where are the wondeful photos taken with your wondeful SR camera?"
Good question. The answer is "no cameras are allowed inside the concert hall." Even so, I think one or two people sneaked in a camera or two.
After the the three luminaires talked a bit and did touch on the subject that "video games have become finally big enough to have a concert of videgame music like this", the musicians erupted with an unexpected finale (after "they were already done") of Sephiroth's music theme. I knew the chorus was not brought for just one song, and the whole place erupted in cheers when the music started to play. I bet the orchestra musicians were probably amazed that all the people there would recognize immediately and with such energy the composition.. of you know ... a videogame :-)
No, not me. But captured this fireman closing a lane with those shiny bursty pink things...
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