Lillie Harris and "The Great Escape"

Peter Bernstein (son of legendary film composer Elmer Bernstein) posted this on Facebook … thought I would share it here since not everyone here is probably on FB. Lillie Harris, the author of the terrific manual, is not only a terrific manual writer but also excellent when it comes to music prep.

“The Great Escape Live last night. Where do I even start? The amazing BBC Concert Orchestra which preformed heroically - a three hour rehearsal followed by a three hour performance of a very energetic score. Lillie Harris who prepared the scores in record time and especially Tommy Pearson, without whom none of this would have ever happened - and this just a few weeks after becoming the father of twin boys months earlier than planned. The crowd clapping along with the theme at the end and especially the score itself which is a masterpiece. An honor to conduct and the only off note being that my father was not there to see it, but I felt like he was around somewhere.”

And now of course I’m very curious whether Dorico was use to prepare the score and parts for this show!

Kudos to Lillie! Very cool.

(But Peter, perhaps change the thread title to something like “Lillie Harris praised in the news” or “Congrats to Lillie” or something similar. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the subject line; in my experience messages titled only with someone’s name are usually the harbinger of very sad news indeed.)

Yes, Dorico was indeed used to prepare all of the performance materials for “The Great Escape Live in Concert”. It was a great evening: a wonderful movie, an iconic score, an appreciative audience, and of course the beautiful score and parts prepared by our own Lillie. Lillie also did the prep work for “The Piano Live in Concert” back in February, which we also supported, and which you can read about here.

Oh dang, that certainly wasn’t my intention, my apologies! I believe Daniel already changed the title.

What lovely news. I’m particularly pleased to hear that Lillie Harris is alive :smiley:

That is terrific!!!

What a terrific soundtrack (and movie). https://youtu.be/y03rOfem0N8

Well this is a very pleasant thread to stumble on after problems with the trains this morning! Yes as Daniel has already said, the entire score for The Great Escape was meticulously re-orchestrated directly into Dorico from the piano short-score from the original recording sessions by Tommy Pearson (a fantastic, nay, frankly extraordinary gentleman, who amongst other things in his illustrious career has set up Big Screen Live in order to put on these film-with-live-orchestra events).

As you might imagine across such a long film (2hours 50mins), there is a lot of music and it is divided into over 30 separate cues, so the flow headings feature came mightily in handy in the parts (on average, 38 pages each). As did the revolutionary Dorico cues, as a number of players had short entries after rather a long break. (Although looking back, I omitted to add a cue before a brass entry where they only had a single note to play in the entire cue, so I’ll be going back to make some improvements :wink: )

Those in the UK can listen to Peter talking about the project on the BBC Radio 3 show In Tune (from around 20mins in)

Oh and -

Yeah, me too :wink:

Oh please, no need to apologize! I was certainly surprised to discover a Pavlovian response I hadn’t been conscious of. My apologies to you and Lillie in turn for overreacting.

Terrific, congratulations Lillie!!