Even if the world is not enough, a 007 concert is

01-Jan-2008 • Event

The 007 series is a classic, and a clever and fun theme for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra to say goodbye to 2007 - reports the Star Telegram.

On Monday evening at Bass Hall, the orchestra, English vocalist Mary Carewe and music director Miguel Harth-Bedoya found the right formula for this New Year's Eve musical concoction. Shaken, of course, not stirred.

While the Viennese have their countless waltzes to celebrate the new year, an evening of songs and orchestral scores from the Bond films seemed to serve a similar purpose: It's a nostalgia tour. Harth-Bedoya led a sequential survey of Bond music, beginning with From Russia with Love from 1963 and ending with 2006's Casino Royale.

On a personal note, the conductor related his first experience with Bond, a 1977 screening of The Spy Who Loved Me, when he was a boy growing up in Peru. His chaperone, his now 95-year-old aunt, was in the Bass Hall audience Monday.

In a similar way, your own memories and imagination were stirred by the famous themes and title songs in the evening's program. As the singer of such popular melodies as Goldfinger, Nobody Does It Better, For Your Eyes Only and Live and Let Die, Carewe's job wasn't easy. She had to evoke, without impersonating, such diverse voices as Shirley Bassey, Carly Simon, Sheena Easton and Paul McCartney. Yet with a crisp delivery and a versatile vocal range at her command, Carewe performed admirably.

If there was any complaint, the brass-heavy, syncopated strains of "chase music" had too much presence on Monday's program. Doesn't chase music all sound the same anyway? Instead, the Fort Worth Symphony could have presented some more varied music from the Bond series, perhaps more John Barry title music. The composer for many Bond films, Barry is a master craftsman with a gift for lush melody and spacious orchestration. His Living Daylights Suite, in the program's second half, was a highlight.

Nic Raine was credited for the concert's charts and musical arrangements. Amid some of the scores' challenging cross-rhythms and compound meters, the Fort Worth Symphony performed as skillfully as it would a subscription series concert. New Year's Eve or not.

The program was as follows:
James Bond theme
From Russia with Love
007 Theme
Dawn Raid at Fort Knox
Diamonds are Forever
Thunderball
The Look of Love
Ride To Atlantis/The Tanker
Nobody Does It Better
Intermission
For Your Eyes Only
Ski Chase - OHMSS
Live and Let Die
All Time High
Living Daylights Suite
License to Kill
Goldeneye Tank Chase
Goldeneye
You Know My Name
James Bond Theme
Encores - Surrender, The Man with the Golden Gun
And, since it was New Year's Eve, Auld Lang Syne

Thanks to `g2force` for the alert.