Many celebrated composers have been inspired by the sea -- think Mendelssohn's Hebrides overture, Debussy's La Mer and Benjamin Britten's Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, to name a few.
But George Fenton thinks the music he wrote for the popular BBC ocean documentary series The Blue Planet brings an added dimension to existing sound portraits of the sea.
"They wrote all these things without seeing really what's down there," Fenton says. "And the thing that's different about what I did was I could see what was down there, how these [sea] creatures behaved. I wrote the score for the creatures, really."
Sea animals, mammoth to microscopic, will share top billing with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra when Fenton brings his Blue Planet Live to the Meyerson Symphony Center tonight through Thursday. An outgrowth of the popular TV series produced by the BBC along with Discovery Channel, Blue Planet Live will feature stunning undersea footage projected onto large video screens as the DSO plays Fenton's sweeping musical score.
Fenton will conduct this Texas debut of a concert that's been a hit across England, and in Los Angeles and Montreal. (After Dallas, the show moves to Seattle.)
"The double effect of seeing the images on an 80-foot screen and seeing a full orchestra of 80 people working underneath that screen to bring those images to life -- it becomes a theatrical experience," Fenton says.
Fenton, 57, wrote soundtracks to the movies Gandhi, Dangerous Liaisons, Groundhog Day, Fight Club and more than 70 others. He won an Emmy Award for The Blue Planet, which was first broadcast in 2001.
Blue Planet Live, which debuted in 2006, pulls together the most dramatic scenes from more than 70,000 hours of video shot to narrate life in the oceans. Sharks glide, dolphins frolic, an enormous blue whale breaches for air. A narrator introduces each sequence.
"It's more a way of allowing the audience to see the most intimate things but also the biggest fireworks that there are in the oceans -- and on a scale that's so grand," Fenton says.
His music conveys the emotional urgency of real-life dramas beneath the waves, and it's not always Disney-sweet. Some ocean creatures die in the movie, which might be shocking to young children. For example, a six-minute sequence follows a gray whale and her calf who encounter a pod of killer whales. "It's very, very tragic," Fenton says.
"But there's also a kind of magnificence in their hunting skills," he continues. "And just the power of these creatures in this contest -- it's got an epic quality. Of course, you feel for the prey. But you can't help be impressed by the predator."
Blue Planet Live unfolds in two 40-minute segments with an intermission.
"It is a reminder of just how extraordinary and beautiful this habitat is, and how fragile," Fenton says. -- www.dallassymphony.com
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