Special St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (SLSO) holiday programming continues this weekend (Saturday and Sunday, December 28 and 29)
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| Scott Terrell Photo courtesy of the SLSO |
Saturday at 7 pm and Sunday at 2 pm, Scott Terrell conducts the SLSO in “How to Train Your Dragon in Concert.” The orchestra will play John Powell’s Oscar®-nominated score for the 2010 DreamWorks animated film while the movie plays in HD on the big screen at the Stifel Center. Based on the 2003 novel of the same name by British author Cressida Cowell, “How to Train Your Dragon” spawned two additional full-length animated films, five shorts and, coming next year, a live-action remake of the original.
Powell’s composing credits include popular animated films such as “Shrek,” “Kung-Fu Panda,” and “Chicken Run.” His sources of inspiration for the epic sound of “How to Train Your Dragon” include Celtic folk music and the massive sound canvases of Jean Sibelius and other Scandinavian composers. Powell is a prolific music producer as well. His company, 5 Cat Studios, specializes in soundtrack music and classical and contemporary concert works.
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| John Powell johnpowellmusic.com |
Terrell, who has conducted the SLSO in the past, is an educator as well as a performer. He holds the Virginia Martin Howard Chair at the Louisiana State University School of Music, where he is Associate Professor of Orchestral Studies. He’s also active in the world of opera, having conducted for Kentucky Opera, Hong Kong Opera, and Arizona Opera. Earlier in his career, Terrell was chosen as a fellowship conductor for the inaugural season of the American Academy of Conducting at the Aspen Music Festival, where he participated in classes with, among many others, former SLSO Music Directors David Robertson and Leonard Slatkin.
Finally, a few works about the author of the original novel would seem to be in order, since writers whose works become the basis for major movies sometimes fade into the background, the experience of J.K. Rowling notwithstanding.
To begin with, let’s give the author her full title: the Hon. Cressida Cowell, MBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), FRSL (Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature). She’s an ambassador for the National Literacy Trust and the Reading Agency, a Trustee of World Book Day, and a founder patron of the Children’s Media Foundation. Born Cressida Hare in 1966 in London, Cowell is the daughter of Michael Hare, 2nd Viscount Blakenham and the niece-in-law of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Her husband, Simon Cowell, is the former director and interim CEO of the International Save the Children Alliance.
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| Cressida Cowell www.cressidacowell.co.uk |
She spent her summers on the islands of the Inner Hebrides, just off the west coast of Scotland, and it was there that her talents as a writer and artist became apparent. Recalling that aspect of her childhood in a New York Times article in 2000, she writes:
The island had no roads or electricity—just a storm-blown, windy wilderness of sea birds and heather. My family and I would be dropped off like castaways on the island by a local boatman for the summer holidays and picked up again weeks later. While we were staying on the island, we had no way of contacting the outside world.
Because there wasn’t any electricity, the house was lit by candlelight. Without a telephone or a television, I spent a lot of time drawing and writing stories. In the evenings, my father told me and my siblings tales of the Vikings who invaded the island 1,200 years before, of the quarrelsome ancient British tribes who fought one another, and of dragons who were supposed to live in the caves in the cliffs of the island.
The rest, as the cliché goes, is history—and a prolific literary career. In addition to her dozen “How to Train Your Dragon” books, her publications include the series “The Wizards” (five books), “Treetop Twins Adventures” (twelve), “Treetop Twins Wilderness Adventures (another dozen), “Tiny Detectives” (thirteen), “Emily Brown” (five), and fourteen other “one of” books. As of the current Wikipedia article, anyway. The bottom line is that she is a force majeure in children’s lit with multiple projects running simultaneously.
Cowell is also an environmentalist who is concerned that too few children today have the opportunity to explore the natural world. “What might that mean,” she asks, “for their future creativity and their relationship to the natural world? As we face the threat of the climate crisis and the slow destruction of habitats around the world, we must give children the opportunity to interact with nature in a ‘wild’ way, so that they learn to preserve the natural world around us.”
Granted, those ideas aren’t central to this weekend’s film, but it’s worth having them in the back of your mind as you marvel at the imaginative animation and luxuriate in the exciting score.
SLSO holiday concerts conclude on Tuesday, December 31, with the annual New Year’s Eve Celebration. More on that in my next preview.
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