Lansing Symphony Orchestra to provide a live soundtrack to Harry Potter screening

The Wizarding world is coming to East Lansing this weekend.

will be playing at the Wharton Center, and the Lansing Symphony Orchestra will provide the soundtrack.

Last year, the LSO presented a similar program with the first Harry Potter movie.

WKAR's Scott Pohl takes us Inside The Arts to talk about the magic that guest conductor Ron Spigelman hopes to spin.

For this program, the music is stripped from the film and is instead played live over the dialog that remains.

This year, like last, the Harry Potter movie will be shown on a 40-foot screen at MSU's Wharton Center while soundtrack is performed live by the Lansing Symphony Orchestra.

Ron Spigelman is back as guest conductor. He's based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but also freelances, and he's led dozens of orchestras in "live to projection" movies. He's done it for all but one of the Harry Potter films.

Spigelman says he loves the John Williams film scores, especially how you can hear a hint of the theme for the chamber of secrets in the first movie, introduced when Harry goes to Gringott's Wizarding Bank for the gold left for him there by his parents. "We hear that theme only briefly," he explains. "Well, it turns out the theme sort of transforms into the theme for the actual chamber of secrets in the second movie because like the bank vault, it's kind of a secret place."

Spigelman also says Williams has a special affinity for writing about flight scenes like flying cars and games of quidditch, or even back in 1982 when the bicycles flew in his earlier score for He continues, "what I love about John Williams is the progression that he makes with his thematic material into the later movies, and at the same time, he introduces the new characters in a very individual way that you don't forget the themes. Once you hear them, then you know them."

A concert conductor needs to focus on both the score and the musicians. For these programs, there's the added element of making sure it all matches up with what the audience is seeing on screen. Spigelman prepares by reviewing a file of the film on his laptop called the conductor's feed, and adding sticky notes to his score. He explains "I am able to go back into sort of in a sense, like a reflexive state of how these films work physically for me, personally, to be able to transmit that information into gesture to the orchestra to understand, and at the same time be in sync with the movie."

Spigelman encourages audiences to stick around for the end credits. He describes that time, with no action on the screen, as a mini concert. "They get to hear all the themes again, but this time without watching a movie," he concludes. "They can actually focus on the orchestra. In this one in particular, even though we cut halfway through the end credits, we finish our music...I encourage people to stay all the way through because there's actually a secret scene in this movie at the very end that not many people know about."

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets In Concert is Saturday, November 16th at the Wharton Center, with shows at 2 and 7:30 p.m.