Review: Top Gun: Maverick In Concert, Orchestra of Opera North

Last Monday evening, the Grand Theatre hosted a spectacular event for movie lovers. The musical score for the Tom Cruise 2022 blockbuster action-drama movie Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski, was performed live-to-picture by the Orchestra of Opera North, conducted by Ben Palmer. Ben’s 100-plus Films in Concert include Hitchcock’s Psycho with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and an upcoming Top Gun: Maverick with the San Francisco Symphony.

This epic score for the sequel to Tony Scott’s iconic film Top Gun (1986) was composed by Lorne Balfe. The Scottish composer is now one of Hollywood’s most sought after names with music for more than fifty films and TV shows under his belt. Balfe’s thrilling, spacious and ultimately uplifting score is backed up by Harold Faltermeyer’s stirring - anything is possible - Top Gun Anthem, Lady Gaga’s ‘Hold My Hand’ and Hans Zimmer’s ‘You Belong Here’. Plus Songs from the 1986 film like Kenny Loggin’s ‘Danger Zone’ and Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ - performed by Miles Teller (Lt Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw).

Experienced in your neighbourhood multiplex, a film score might not be the most memorable aspect of this or any other movie. A gilded Grade ll* listed opera house, however, with tier upon tier of crimson plush seating and a full width screen onstage above a fifty-piece orchestra adds a magical new dimension to the experience.

Enhanced by the Grand Theatre’s awesome new surround-sound system, the fly by scenes as Capt Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell leads his team of young pilots above lakes and snow capped mountains and into deep deep canyons on a seemingly impossible mission, are a knockout.

There are some quieter reflective moments and gentle humour in Maverick’s rekindled love interest with Jennifer Connelly’s Penny Benjamin. Maverick has to stand a round of drinks for the entire company in Penny’s Hard Deck Bar. Then he is carried outside to chants of "Overboard" and dumped in the snow because his card was declined. Maverick’s reunion with ‘Ice Man’, the ailing Val Kilmer now Admiral Tom Kazansky, reaches the heart. Ice Man’s subsequent burial in bright sunshine and with full Naval pomp and ceremony becomes all the more poignant.

A stupendous evening cheered to the rafters by a packed audience. Opera North should do more of these Films in Concert.