If the theme from Jaws seems particularly nerve-jangling when the Victoria Symphony performs it at the Royal Theatre on Saturday, chances are it’s because conductor Sean O’Loughlin had his own close encounter with great white sharks not so long ago.
It was while he was on tour with Josh Groban in Cape Town, South Africa. The pop-opera star invited his conductor to hop aboard a helicopter Groban had chartered. Before long, they were in so-called Shark Alley — a sea channel off the coast — for a shark-cage diving adventure O’Loughlin will never forget.
“There I am in a cage with Josh and a couple of the crew, and these great white sharks are circling around us and we smell like chum,” said the 45-year-old arranger, composer and conductor, recalling how it brought back memories of Steven Spielberg’s classic thriller, which stars Robert Shaw as a shark hunter. “I was waiting for Robert Shaw to come out and say: ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat.’ ”
It wasn’t just his Jaws-like experience that made O’Loughlin, the symphony’s new principal pops conductor, ideally suited to take the baton for its Hollywood Thrillers concerts, set for 2 and 8 p.m. (O’Loughlin, who has previously served as a guest conductor of the symphony’s pops concerts, will officially begin his tenure with the symphony for the 2018 season.)
Since he made Los Angeles his home 20 years ago, O’Loughlin, also principal pops conductor of Symphoria in Syracuse, New York, has been a Hollywood fixture himself, working with artists such as Adele and Steven Tyler, and conducting the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.
It helps that he got his start in Hollywood as a copyist and proofreader of film scores for a company whose clients included John Williams, the Oscar-winning composer whose Jurassic Park and Close Encounters of the Third Kind scores will also be featured on Saturday. Other concert highlights include music from Spellbound, Psycho, Basic Instinct, Double Indemnity and Apocalypse Now.
O’Loughlin worked on more than 30 Williams scores, counting Memoirs of a Geisha, featuring cellist Yo Yo Ma, among his most satisfying experiences.
He has particularly fond memories of a recording session at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus. “John had an idea and gave us a last-minute addition to the recording session at 7 a.m. and he wanted to record it at 10,” recalled O’Loughlin, who would work from William’s sketches, “which are so very complete,” and prepared parts for various players.
“Talk about an education. Just seeing how he creates his sound, working with the orchestrators is incredible,” O’Loughlin said. “There I was, 10 feet away from John and Yo Yo Ma performing this gorgeous sequence of music from one of the peaks of the film.”
Over 11 years, O’Loughlin worked on music for 250 movies and TV shows. “It was kind of a behind-the-scenes, see-how-the-sausage-is- made approach that I’m able to bring to the pop-conducting world,” he said. “The stories I’m able to drop are firsthand accounts of what happens in the film world.”
As exhilarating as it was creating movie magic with such legendary musicians, O’Loughlin said it was eye-opening in another way. “You realize that they pull up their pants just like we do, and drink water and talk and collaborate.”
He applauded the “brilliance in minimalism” of both Williams’s score for Jaws and Bernard Hermann’s for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.
“John always gets pegged as the two-note guy, but it’s so much more than that,” he said. “He is so masterful. He would change the tempo of those two notes… and the pacing! If it was a chase scene, it would go ‘boom, boom, boom’ and then he’d have it soft.”
The musical minimalism was a response to Spielberg’s request to create a pace that would conjure up a sense of foreboding.
“It’s because of all the mechanical problems with the shark — they didn’t have as much camera time as they wanted,” he said. “How do you tell there is a shark coming without physically seeing the shark? He knew these two notes and this gesture would do it.”
O’Loughlin demonstrated by playing his own piano over the phone, and referred to an Igor Stravinsky quote about how self-imposed limitations can drive creativity.
“Stravinsky’s greatest melodies are like five notes, and the way he spins those five notes is brilliant, and you have to think almost hyper-creatively to get more out of less,” he said.
That’s what Williams does, he said, as well as Hermann for Psycho’s shower scene.