Auckland Philharmonia at the Film Festival

By HEATH LEES

CIVIC THEATRE - When Kosinzev and Trauberg's film The New Babylon was released in 1929, the live music by Shostakovich was greeted with derision.

The problem was that the projectionists sped up their movies to increase the total number of showings, and so the front-facing orchestra fell sadly - sometimes hilariously - behind.

By contrast, the element that impressed most on Sunday was the split-second precision of American conductor Timothy Brock, who probably knows the film backwards by now.

Five minutes into a reel and the side-drum plays in perfect match with a quick shot of a drummer rat-a-tatting on the battlefield. The music falls silent at the end of a harrowing scene and, for a moment, a character stares silently into the distance as the slow fade on screen creates its own unhappy diminuendo.

Ironic musical barbs abound. Just as the idealism of the Paris workers' brave faces and heavenly lighting begins to melt into despair, so does the boisterous Marseillaise merge painfully with the crass entertainment music of the cancan.

There was also the rich sound of Shostakovich's slow movements in the deep and slow string music that played at the end, while the Communards dug their own graves before trial.

Earlier, Beethoven's "Victory" rhythm was boisterous during the workers' takeover, caricatured during the pretended bourgeois accommodation of their demands, and finally transformed into a gloomy funeral march.

Shostakovich had originally set his music for a 14-piece band, so the orchestral re-arrangement revealed a few exposed and difficult parts at speed.

A solo violin not quite getting the notes sounds quaint in the cinema. A few of them fluffing it together sounds wrong.

To add to the troubles, the sound in the hall was not enhanced, but simply reinforced with microphones and stage speakers.

Those in the circle complained of hearing it boxed-in, mostly coming from the top left corner. Down below, the brass players juggled uncomfortably between what they played and what they heard.

But overall the marrying of sound and image 70 years on made a classic film into an unforgettable event.