The Silence of the Lambs: Live in Concert at The Bridgewater Hall

The Silence of the Lambs is accompanied by a live performance from the Hallé orchestra at the Bridgewater Hall in association with Big Screen Live this January. The iconic, multi-Oscar-winning 1991 film from director Jonathan Demme is both a gripping police procedural and first class horror, boasting one of the all time movie monsters in Dr. Hannibal Lecter, as played by Anthony Hopkins.

Opening on the fields of the FBI’s Quantico Academy, we find aspiring agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) drawn into the hunt for serial killer Buffalo Bill. She’s sent to the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to interview Hannibal Lecter, a charismatic cannibal and former psychiatrist, whose expertise may hold the key to unlocking the case. The pair form an unlikely connection, as Starling’s tenacity and intellect, as well as her outsider status as both an orphan and a woman in the FBI, stokes some sympathy in Lecter.

Thirty-five years on, the Hallé orchestra led by conductor Caleb Young, will perform composer Howard Shore’s The Silence of the Lambs score live, transporting audiences from the FBI training fields, to Lecter’s prison cell, to Buffalo Bill’s underground lair. The prolific Canadian composer is famed for his epic, pulse-pounding scores for Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, alongside the darker, atmospheric music created for the films of long-term collaborator David Cronenberg (The Fly, Videodrome), and selected scores for Martin Scorsese.

Jonathan Demme is well-known for the music in his films, from Talking Heads concert doc Stop Making Sense to the pop-compilations of Something Wild and Married to the Mob. The score for The Silence of the Lambs was Shore’s first collaboration with the filmmaker (they would work together again on Philadelphia two years later) and provides a lush, haunting accompaniment to Demme’s slick direction and the pyrotechnic performances from Foster and Hopkins.