Alan Silvestri in Concert at the World Soundtrack Awards

On October 24th, Alan Silvestri’s music will fill the hall of ‘t Kuipke in Gent during the 2015 World Soundtrack Awards. To commemorate the occasion, a special album has been recorded by the Brussels Philharmonic, conducted by Dirk Brosse. The album was crowd-funded earlier this year, and will be for sale during and after the festival. Synchrotones is proud to be a co-funder of this unique recording, which includes music from “The Polar Express”, “MouseHunt”, “The Quick and the Dead”, “Forrest Gump”, “Cast Away”, “The Mummy Returns” and several more. Of course, it also features “Back to the Future” which is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

Synchrotones will be attending the concert, so you can expect a report right here on this site in the days following the event. Stay tuned!

Below is copy of the WSA’s press release. You can find more information about the WSA and this year’s events by clicking here (link will take you to WSA’s website).

With his percussion driven scores and arrangements one can only compare with roller coasters, Alan Silvestri has emerged as one of the major Hollywood composers that broke through in the eighties.

Although Silvestri has succeeded in writing successful scores for films that were able to exist on their own, his name remains associated with some of the most popular films of the last decades: Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump. Three titles that are not coincidental all by Robert Zemeckis. After the technically ground breaking director asked Silvestri to write the music for his third film, Romancing the Stone (with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas) in 1984, Silvestri composed the scores for all of Zemeckis’ films thereafter.

A rather unique collaboration in film history, which will certainly be the focus of the concert. Silvestri’s music for Zemeckis is instantly recognizable, but also extremely varied, ranging from sweeping action of the Back to the Future trilogy, lovely piano themes from Forrest Gump or sweet melodies from The Polar Express (the first all-digital-capture film), to the exuberant jazz from the live action/animation mix Who Framed Roger Rabbit and the aggressive percussion for the macabre fantasy Death Becomes Her.

Other directors who were eager to work with Silvestri received scores from different registers of the film music repertoire. For James Cameron’s epic underwater film The Abyss, Silvestri used a blend of synthesisers and orchestral music to deliver a score that sounded alternately explosive, mysterious and ecclesiastical. For Sam Raimi’s The Quick and the Dead he composed a rather fitting tribute to the legendary scores of Ennio Morricone. Add the superhero blockbuster The Avengers, the horror adventure The Mummy Returns and the comedy Father of the Bride and The Parent Trap and you will notice that there isn’t a genre that Alan Silvestri has left untouched. Though he confesses he has a weakness for pure action scores. “I have a great time on the hard-hitting action material”. Looks like it will be an action packed WSAwards concert this year.

The Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Patrick Doyle following the festival’s focus on British Cinema. Anyone who can still recount hearing Doyle’s score for Kenneth Branagh’s debut film ‘Henry V’ in 1989 for the first time, knows that back then a great composer was born. Ever since, Patrick Doyle has been a close collaborator with Mr. Branagh and always gave a deeper musical layer to all of his films including the Shakespeare adaptations (‘Henry V’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’, ‘As You Like It’ and ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’). The immensely versatile Doyle enriched the films by Robert Altman, Ang Lee, Chen Kaige, Alfonso Cuarón and Brian DePalma with his alternating tragic, noble, triumphant and romantic compositions. With his work on blockbusters such as ‘Rise of the Planet of the Apes’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ and more recenly ‘Cinderella’ he certainly proved his talent working on spectacular Hollywood films.

Film Fest Gent also welcomes Daniel Pemberton, winner of the Discovery Award 2014, as one of its guest. The British composer was awarded for his scores: The Counselor by Ridley Scott and Cuban Fury by James Griffiths. Pemberton was only sixteen when he began composing in 1994 and now has 103 credits to his name, largely owed to the numerous TV series (Desperate Romantics, Occupation), mini series (Upstairs Downstairs, The Games), TV docs, television movies and games for which he provided the music. It has only been in these last couple of years that he focuses on feature films, such as The Man from UNCLE by Guy Ritchie as one of his recent major works.