Watch: Michael Giacchino Conducting LOST Music Live in Concert
On Friday night at the Ford Amphitheater in Los Angeles, Carlton Cuse — one of Lost's showrunners — said that although he's admittedly biased, he considers Michael Giacchino's score for the show to be the best music ever composed for a television series. I agree with him, and in a way, I'm also biased: the show has meant a tremendous amount to me over the years, largely for being one of the first things my wife and I connected over. (The first time we hung out was at a special Lost Live performance of the music back in 2010.) But even attempting to remove my personal attachment to the show and look at it objectively, Giacchino's score is so much better than the music for nearly anything else on TV.
So when they announced We Have to Go Back: The Lost Concert, which would reunite Giacchino with the Hollywood Studio Symphony Orchestra (the same musicians with whom he recorded the actual score for the episodes), I knew we had to attend. Before the show began, Giacchino and Cuse came out and participated in an audience Q&A, where a few pieces of interesting information came to light. Someone asked which songs were Giacchino's favorite to compose, and he said the ones that meant the most to him were "LAX" and "Oceanic 6." A guy from the UK tried to pry a hint out of the composer regarding his newly-announced work on Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, but Giacchino wasn't having any of that. "I literally just started writing that thing," he said. "I have no idea [what kind of music it will have]. It's a lot of fun, I'm having a blast. This is my chance to get away from that." And someone flew all the way from Hong Kong to ask Cuse about what happened in the Dharma Initiative during the three years they were in operation that the show didn't touch on. "They smoked a lot of weed," he revealed to laughter from the audience, "and ABC didn't want us to put that on the air."
Damon Lindelof, Cuse's co-showrunner, couldn't be there because he was in Australia shooting The Leftovers, but he sent in a video greeting that played before the music began. Some of the actors and writers from the show were in attendance, though, including Drew Goddard, Brian K. Vaughan, Jeff Pinkner, Kevin Durand (who played the mercenary Keamy) and Mira Furlan (who played the French woman Danielle Rousseau).
The music kicked off by the orchestra playing along live with the first ten minutes or so of the pilot episode, which was projected on two side walls near the stage. After that, they went right into "Departing Sun":
And here's a mostly-complete track listing for what songs they played for the first half of the evening: "Live Together Die Alone," "Smoke Monster," "Locke'd Out Again," "Take a Hike," "The Constant," "Getting Ethan," and "Life and Death." Here's a section from "Take a Hike," which has one of my favorite motifs that appears throughout the show:
As the intermission approached, the orchestra played along with another section of the show projected on the walls: this time, it was the memorable scene of the castaways launching the raft at the end of "Exodus: Part 1," backed by Giacchino's buoyant and moving "Parting Words." For me, there has never been a more powerful marrying of music and visuals.
During the intermission, Dharma recruitment and orientation videos played out on the screens, while the actors in the audience gamely took photos with tons of fans. The show resumed with an intense burst of music under a clip of Jack fighting Locke in the finale, and then comically transitioned directly into one of Hurley's Mr. Cluck chicken commercials. Giacchino introduced the various sections of the orchestra, including a percussionist who played on the original Planet of the Apes!
He also explained that one person in the orchestra is actually playing music on broken pieces of the actual plane that the production crashed for the pilot episode. You can hear a bit of what that sounds like at the start of this video:
After playing "The Others," Cuse came out and explained that he and Lindelof had written some fake letters from the castaways that were read out loud between songs during the first Lost concert in Hawaii years before (they also read these during the show in Los Angeles I attended six years ago). Mira Furlan (Danielle Rousseau) came on stage to read one from one of the show's more...notorious characters:
Kevin Durand (Keamy) came out to read a section of the season three finale script to give us a sense of what the expletive-filled screenplays were like and how much the writers relied on Giacchino's score for extra emphasis. My personal video malfunctioned during this section, but someone else uploaded part of the reading to YouTube:
The back half of the night included "Oceans Apart," a drum-heavy action montage of moments throughout the series, "Oceanic 6," "Bobbing For Freighters," "The Tangled Web," and appropriately wrapped up with the orchestra playing along with the final emotional ten minutes of the series finale.
Giacchino and the orchestra brought the performance to an end with one encore, "LAX." Overall, it was a terrific night that proved that when the music is as good as it was on this show, simply hearing a few notes from it can be just as powerful a reminder of a show's legacy and impact as rewatching it in its entirety.