How to Train Your Dragon 2 in Concert at The Bridgewater Hall

Great film scores can define how a whole generation remembers being a kid. It’s a shame they’re rarely heard as they were recorded – that is, performed in full by a live orchestra, rather than squeezed through a telly or, if you’re a complete monster, a tinny laptop. This Christmas, the Hallé puts that right with a score that rewards the concert hall treatment better than most: John Powell’s for How To Train Your Dragon 2, performed live to picture.

The plot: Five years after Hiccup and his dragon Toothless first won over the Viking village of Berk, the pair spend their days mapping unexplored territory together. Their adventures lead them to a hidden sanctuary of rescued dragons, run by Hiccup’s own long-lost mother – but their discovery draws the attention of a warlord bent on conquering the world with his own dragon army…

Powell’s work on the first film earned an Academy Award nomination. For the sequel, he had a trickier job – Hiccup and Toothless have grown up, and the music needed to grow up with them. “This is a mature film. However, it cannot be Lord of the Rings!”, Powell said of the balancing act. He’s described the process as something close to plate-spinning: push too hard on any single emotional beat, he says, “and it won’t feel right. That’s when you feel the composer is pushing you, rather than pulling you.”

Powell didn’t do the pulling alone. He brought in Jónsi, of Icelandic art-rock band Sigur Rós, to help shape the score’s atmosphere – sessions the pair called “play dates,” swapping ideas until their two very different musical instincts merged. “It was like him and me having a baby,” Powell said of the result. “It was exactly between our two musical natures”.

It’s an unusual pairing for a family blockbuster. The result is something richer and moodier than the first film’s score, built on proper, old-fashioned orchestral writing yet still carrying, as critic Jonathan Broxton put it, “an overwhelmingly positive sense of life, joy and enthusiasm.” Powell resisted the temptation to discard the original film’s themes, instead folding them into new material so the whole thing feels both familiar and freshly expanded – Highland pipes among the additions, once used to frighten approaching armies, and deployed here to foreshadow the film’s most dramatic turns.

Performed live to picture by a full Hallé Orchestra under conductor Stefan Geiger, this is a rare chance to hear the score live, and in the grand surrounds of The Bridgewater Hall to boot. It might not be particularly Christmassy, but it’s a pretty great way to spend a Christmas holiday afternoon, whatever age you are.