Barbican Hall, 14 October 2016

Neil Brand has been honing the art of improvisation for silent films for many years (as those of us in Hastings will recall from many fine evening at St Mary in the Castle). He has also had a desire to write a score for Douglas Fairbanks’ 1922 Robin Hood. Happily the two have come together in the magnificent unveiling of a renewed print of the film and a full score for the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Timothy Brock.

The film was always over the top, with Fairbanks’ outlaw closer to Peter Pan than Mel Gibson – think Men in Tights rather than Prince of Thieves – and from the moment he leaps into the forest it is a joy until the final tongue-in-cheek scenes where the king is banging on the bridal chamber door.

Neil Brand’s score mirrors this enthusiasm with aplomb, its rich romantic passages offset by some nastier scenes drawn from Vaughan Williams at his most introspective. Unlike Carl Davis’ scores for Ben Hur or Napoleon there are no obvious big themes to delineate the characters, rather there is a more subtle atmospheric background which gives us an emotional underpinning to the action and allows characters to develop musically as the film progresses.

As the BBC was involved we can only hope that we will see (and hear) the score again with presumably the potential for a DVD.