I went to the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony’s performance of “James Bond: The Music.” It was glorious — this is music I absolutely love, and the K-W Symphony never lets you down.<\/p>\n
The orchestra’s brass and percussion section were beefed up from what they are for playing things like Beethoven.<\/p>\n
The conductor was John Morris Russell, who I’ve seen a couple of times before. He’s a terrific conductor, and has a great relationship with the orchestra. His jokes are juvenile and he occasionally gets his facts wrong — but I’m there for the music.<\/p>\n
Many of the tunes are songs with lyrics, so there were two singers — Ron Bohmer and Capathia Jenkins. Bohmer was all right, but Jenkins was magnificent — you could call her the woman with the golden voice.<\/p>\n
They could have easily filled the entire concert with James Bond tunes (for example, “You Only Live Twice” and “A View to a Kill” were missing). But they included some other “spy fi” tunes — I wasn’t upset, though, because any day you hear “Soul Bossa Nova,” “Mission: Impossible,” and “The Pink Panther” is a good day.<\/p>\n
Russell got the audience to snap their fingers during the appropriate parts of “The Pink Panther.”<\/p>\n
He surprised us with the song “The Writing’s on the Wall” from the upcoming James Bond movie Spectre<\/strong> — this was its North American premiere.<\/p>\n As an encore they played a great orchestral version of John Barry’s “Goldfinger.”<\/p>\n Here is the complete list of tunes:<\/p>\n\n