Conductor Amy Andersson got a rockstar welcome, the sound washing over the stage, rising to a roar again when she told them that this Legend of Zelda symphony wasn’t a normal performance — she expected them to be loud.
And then, just after 8 p.m., the bows lifted, the brass caught the stage lights, and the music began.
Above: An orchestra performs The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses Master Quest.
Zero hour: The show starts
The arrangement stitched pieces of the soundtracks of a half-dozen games into movements, and footage of those games flitted by on a giant screen over the musicians’ heads.
The compositions that got the biggest fan reactions were, ironically, the ones they were probably most sick of hearing over and over again while they played their favorite games. They cheered for the tunes that accompany Link during his treks across the oceans in Wind Waker, for example, or when he rode across the grasslands on Epona in Twilight Princess.
Every so often, the music would pause as Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto, lead developer Eiji Aonuma (himself a percussionist and leader of Nintendo’s Wind Wakers brass band), and Kondo offered recorded-video insights into the scores, the games, and the night’s compositions.
It was a long performance, running over two hours, but the audience and the musicians never lost focus. Paul knows his stuff; the composers and arrangers had created a dramatic rendering with a sensitive ear for fans’ favorites.
Above: Another performance of The Legend of Zelda symphony.
“The music is very well composed,” Sharpe said later. “Orchestra musicians always appreciate when a composer understands the individual instruments and writes well for them, and [they] also appreciate a composer that scores the various instruments together in a very effective, cohesive way. This is something this composer excelled at. The result is that the music was very effective and impactful. It was very enjoyable to listen to and fun to play, and challenged the musicians in a very positive way.”
Andersson conducted as a tablet scrolled through the music in front of her, each measure popping visually with the beat as it kept time with the video screen behind her players’ heads and in their headsets, making what might be the world’s most complex rhythm game.
Four-fifths of the way through, the projection screen showed nothing but a closeup of some of the musicians, but fans were rapt, some watching with lips parted, every face turned toward the stage.
Their standing ovation at the end was near-instant and rattled the rafters.
One day after the show: The next concert begins
Almost before the performance had ended, Andersson and the rest of the Zelda crew were already on their way to the next show. Performances run through the end of the year across the United States and abroad.
“By the time we strike the stage after a performance and get back to the hotel, it is often aftermidnight,” she said. “Then it is get up at 5:30 a.m., eat breakfast, pack and drive to the airport at 7. We would have an early flight, check into the hotel and then go directly to the venue to set up the stage, rehearse and then have a performance that [next] night.”
Above: Staff coordinate the technical aspects of a Zelda symphony performance backstage.
The orchestra mentally took off their pointed green hats and moved on to Stormtrooper helmets. But the Zelda show made an impression on the performers.
Sharpe isn’t a gamer, but he said he sure appreciated them after the show.
“It was clear that many in the audience do not attend traditional orchestra concerts, but that made it all the more interesting for us,” he said. “Someone in the audience shouted ‘This is so cool!’ at the beginning of the concert, and the screams that came from the audience at the beginning and end of the concert showed an unusual high-energy group of listeners, who really got into the whole experience.
“It was a blast for the musicians to feel the energy from the packed concert hall. It was clear that the audience was uniformly appreciating what they were hearing, and felt what we were trying to portray as we performed. That’s all that any musician can ask for.”
Above: Philip Marinucci, Aynsley Cunliffe, and Marinucci’s Hylian Crest tattoo.
Mellanby hoped that the Zelda show might pique those gamers’ curiosity about the symphony in general.
“This show brought out a lot of people whom likely have never been to an orchestra concert before. There were way more Zelda fans there than there were orchestra fans, if that makes sense,” he said. “Hopefully, by doing more concerts like this, we can create more crossover between Zelda fans and orchestra fans.”
They have a convert in Cunliffe.
“That was a pretty damned good present,” she said after the show. “I don’t know if I can ever top this. I don’t think I will.”