When I was in high school, my afternoons and evenings were made up of two things. The first was the near-daily band practices I’d committed myself to as a member of the school’s junior and senior concert bands, and the other was the hours spent on gaming sessions with the likes of Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, and The Legend of Zelda. While my high school self had a fairly romanticized view of the two art forms, I always saw them as entirely unrelated. Never would I have imagined that the mediums could come together quite the way they do in Video Games Live.
Video Games Live is a passion project by composer and gaming personality Tommy Tallarico that sees symphonies and choirs extracting music out of the 8-bit world and loading them into large scale concert halls across the globe. The show’s ambition is twofold: to earn games recognition in mainstream culture as artistically significant rather than as a purely recreational pastime, and to get young people out to see and experience the symphony.
Alongside conductor Emmanuel Fratianni and roughly 40 symphony and choir members made up entirely of Toronto musicians, Tallorico returned to Massey Hall on March 7th, hosting a two and a half hour journey into the sonic depths of video game classics. The sold-out show contained several interactive segments — an essential part of any game — as attendees were invited on stage as part of a costume contest, for a round of Space Invaders fully scored by the symphony, and many other surprises. An all but essential round of Guitar Hero took place, where a fan played through “The Pretender” by the Foo Fighters on the plastic peripheral while Tallarico backed him up on his own electric guitar.
As for the music itself, the symphony powerfully swept through score after score, hitting every beat and packing nostalgic punches thanks to Fratianni’s renowned conducting. I caught myself tearing up during a rendition of the theme from Kingdom Hearts, a Disney/Final Fantasy crossover game that meant the world to me as a youth. The show benefited from a large screen behind the band that projected iconic scenes from the game being performed at that moment. This, to me, also seemed to be an excellent way to fill in the gaps for songs originating from games with which I was unfamiliar, enticing me to try them out.
As if the concept wasn’t unique enough, Video Games Live occasionally mixed things up by diverging from the symphony in favour of other methods of performance. A bearded YouTube guitarist, for example, referring to himself only as “Viking Jesus,” came on stage to perform a heavy metal tribute to Pokémon (“Because heavy metal and Pokémon go hand in hand”). Later, talented vocalist and cover artist Jillian Aversa provided vocal accompaniment to the band during “Zelda’s Lullaby/Skyward Sword Medley” while dressed in full Princess Zelda cosplay.
A brief look at the fans in attendance proved that Video Games Live achieved its two aforementioned goals. The number of occupied seats exemplified the emotional significance of video game music for many Torontonians, and the excited, glimmering faces of young and old fans alike revealed that the exposure to live music had an all-around positive reception. It’s an entirely unique show in which fans waving lighters and cell phones are both outnumbered by those waving their Nintendo DS’. The show returns to Massey Hall every year, each time with a new set list crafted largely by requests Tallarico receives in the weeks leading up to the performance.
Last year, after Luminato Festival’s Music Mob event, I told a friend that it’s great to be a music nerd in Toronto. While I meant it at the time, that’s never felt more true than when I walked out of Massey Hall after Video Games Live.
