There’s Only One Score Holiday Orchestras Look Forward to Playing Anymore, and You Bet Your Butt It’s Not The Nutcracker
A lot of people, especially people who are old enough to have come of age with Macaulay Culkin, make a point of watching Home Alone this time of year. Brian Lang does them one better. Lang goes to see Home Alone every year at the symphony.
Lang, 39, first went to see the Detroit Symphony Orchestra screen the film, accompanied by a live orchestral performance of its John Williams–composed score, with his wife in 2018. Since then, it’s become a nearly annual pilgrimage (give or take a pandemic). This year, they took their 6-year-old twins with them for the first time.
“We all know the movie basically by heart now, but you still find that everyone has belly laughs throughout,” Lang told me.
This year, major concert halls in Los Angeles, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Toronto, Nashville, London, and more performed (or will perform in the coming days) the score to Home Alone, the hit 1990 movie about a little boy whose parents accidentally (but neglectfully!) forget to bring him on their family vacation, leaving him to defend their enviable suburban home from a couple of thieves. Live movie concerts have become a common draw for orchestras over the past decade or so, but even within the genre, Home Alone holds a special place.
“It’s become almost the orchestral version of The Nutcracker in a way, where orchestras just do it because they know it’s popular,” said Steve Linder, one of the producers of Film Concerts Live, the company behind these events. “It is perfect for the season. It’s a great family event. It sort of ticks all the boxes that they’re looking for.”
Linder and partner Jamie Richardson started Film Concerts Live, a joint venture of talent agencies IMG and Gorfaine/Schwartz, in 2013. Home Alone has been integral since the very beginning: It was the first movie the company ever put on. This month, Linder and Richardson are celebrating the 10-year anniversary of its inaugural performance. They knew they wanted to start with a Williams score, but ironically, Linder only watched the movie for the first time when they were trying to decide which one to pick. “The truth is, because I’m Jewish and I celebrate Hanukkah, I had never seen Home Alone until we started talking about doing it,” he said. When he finally watched it, he immediately understood all the hype. Combining elements of adventure, slapstick comedy, and emotional drama, Home Alone had everything they were looking for.
“I like to think that we were prescient when we decided to do Home Alone, that we knew that the whole film-with-orchestra live-presentation genre was going to explode,” Linder said. “We did not know that in advance.”
“We certainly weren’t the first to do this kind of thing in live concert,” Richardson added, “but what had been done before we came along largely were more classic films like Casablanca, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Wizard of Oz. Steve and I saw a particular need to develop more contemporary films from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s that people love, and develop them in this same kind of style.”
Since 2013, Film Concerts Live has licensed more than 20 other movies to be performed in this way, including others with Williams scores like E.T. and Jurassic Park. Though Home Alone isn’t their most popular title, it’s proved to be a steady crowd-pleaser. They’ve booked over 350 performances of the movie with live orchestras, and they estimate that they’ve been watched by half a million people. This year, Film Concerts Live will produce 60 performances of Home Alone, a number that has grown steadily from one in 2013 to 54 last year. “This year, for the first time, we were in Lithuania,” Linder said. “And we’re doing so well that they’ve already booked two performances for next year.”
Home Alone, in addition to being a beloved modern classic, is also a movie where characters call each other “puke breath” and “phlegm wad” within the first few minutes, so it’s amusing to discover that it’s become such a symphony staple. Jokes about bedwetting? BB guns being aimed at crotches? Lydia Tár would never! Or at least, Lydia Tár at the beginning of Tár would never.
“I think at first it probably did seem a little strange to everybody that we’re doing this,” said Joshua Gersen, who will be the guest conductor at this year’s San Francisco Symphony performances of Home Alone (and has started to lose count of how many times he’s performed it). Gersen grew up watching Home Alone, but did he ever think he’d wind up performing its music to a crowd of hundreds? “I always wanted to be a conductor, so certainly when I was a kid, I imagined myself conducting,” he said. “But I certainly would never imagine myself conducting the score to Home Alone.”
Still, Linder and Richardson insist that any Tár-style snobbishness around performing contemporary music scores is mostly a thing of the past. “The attitude of orchestras towards playing live film with orchestra has dramatically shifted over the 10 years we’ve been doing this,” Linder said.
Jeremy Reynolds, a classical music critic at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who has written about the trend of live movie concerts, agreed that the tide has turned. Aside from “a few curmudgeons in any symphony orchestra that might roll their eyes,” Reynolds said, “now you really don’t meet that many people that have a problem with it anymore, especially since they’ve discovered that it’s quite a good cash generator for the orchestras.” In his reporting, Reynolds found that a couple nights of performances can gross on the order of $250,000 for an orchestra. “It’s nothing to sneeze at for a nonprofit,” he said.
Home Alone can be puerile at times, but its persistence as a movie that isn’t part of an intellectual property–driven franchise might also be considered admirable in 2023. It’s just a wholesome story about a kid who misses his family—and decides to torture some criminals. Maybe there’s even something that feels a little enjoyably mischievous about getting to watch it in such a highbrow setting as a concert hall. We are all Kevin, unsupervised, “eating junk and watching rubbish,” when we watch Home Alone at the symphony.
Administrators and musicians hope that, in addition to turning a profit, performances like this will attract people who wouldn’t normally seek out live classical music. It worked for Lang, who prior to becoming a live Home Alone concert habitué didn’t make it to the orchestra much. “A lot of people kind of have this stuffy perception of the symphony,” he said. “They don’t really relate to it.” But who can’t relate Home Alone?
It’s even true of the musicians. Where you might expect some grousing about having to watch Joe Pesci get lit on fire for the umpteenth time, the performers I spoke to seemed thrilled to get to play the music of Home Alone. After all, many of them are millennials, too.
“I’ve been looking forward to playing John Williams scores for a long time,” said Sonia Mantell, a cellist with the Minnesota Orchestra. “No one has a bad part. It just feels very easy to be engaged the whole time when playing his film scores.”
Adam Long, a keyboardist who performed the Home Alone score last year with the Sequoia Symphony Orchestra in central California, said he was “ecstatic” when he first got the opportunity: “For a movie that’s a family Christmas comedy with a lot of silly moments, [Williams] just comes up with this brilliant score,” he said. “He didn’t have to go that hard. But he did.”
That’s not to say performing movie scores isn’t a little different than a more traditional orchestra performance. “A lot of it’s really about precision,” Gersen, the conductor, said. “It’s a much more sort of technical challenge.”
“It’s really freaking hard,” Reynolds, the critic, agreed. “We’re talking about lining up 100 individual musicians who can’t see the screen very, very carefully with very specific motions. It’s insanely difficult to do, but some of the tech they use to do this now is just hilariously impressive.”
Conductors get a special video of the movie that includes visual aids to help them line up the music. “You really have to multitask,” Gersen said. “Usually when you’re up on the podium, you want to be connecting with the musicians and making eye contact or paying as much attention to them as you can, but when you have this movie element, it’s an extra thing that you need to be focused on. I always have to have one eye on the screen to make sure that everything is lined up there.”
Home Alone has a famous set piece in its last act that features a Rube Goldberg machine–esque sequence of booby traps, and naturally it’s all choreographed to match the score perfectly. “That whole sequence toward the end when they’re going to the house with all the traps, there’s a lot of sound effects kind of things where the music has to line up exactly, like when someone gets an iron in the face or slips on the ice or whatever it is,” Gersen said. At its worst, “you feel like you’re sort of in this straitjacket making sure that everything is exactly right … but it’s really rewarding when you get it right.”
Mantell, the cellist, said that despite the pressure, there’s usually an inherently more relaxed atmosphere when the orchestra is performing the score to a movie like Home Alone. “We’ll be catching each other’s eye while we’re playing and we’ll be laughing at what we’re hearing come from the film and people’s reactions.”
She’s played a few film scores over the years that she’s been less enthused about, but she didn’t want to dwell on them. “Sometimes the scores, we don’t do that much. We’ll be holding a note for like, measures and measures. It just feels like we’re not really contributing a lot. It depends on the composer, to be honest.”
But with Home Alone, she’s happy to play it again—and again. Does that mean orchestras will still be playing the Home Alone score in 10 years? Twenty? Fifty? As long as audiences delight in seeing a little boy wage war on some criminals while learning the true meaning of Christmas, it seems like orchestras will be more than happy to oblige.
