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Yesterday Bear McCreary, composer of the music for Battlestar Galactica, conducted a live performance of his music at The Roxy in West Hollywood. The performance was nothing less than outstanding. How you take music written for a full orchestra and condense it down to twelve musicians (plus one singer for a couple songs) I don’t know, but it worked.

The opening act was McCreary’s younger brother Brendan McCreary. Those familiar with the BSG music will know Brendan’s voice as the vocalist from the song All Along the Watchtower. He borrowed a few of his brother’s orchestra members to assemble his band and sang a few songs. While the style wasn’t really to my liking — it just didn’t gel for me — Brendan McCreary has fantastic vocals and is an excellent guitarist.

Once his younger brother’s set was complete, Bear McCreary and his mini-orchestra took the stage. Again, I am still amazed at how they preformed such epic music with such a small group, but many were taking multiple roles in order to pull it off, a testament to their musical abilities. For instance, a couple of the guitarist would backup on the tyco drums for the pieces were multiple tyco’s were necessary. Many of the pieces that he has written that require a full strings section were not included for obvious reasons. The show mostly consisted of the hard rocking pieces that are a staple to BSG’s soundtrack. Unfortunately they did not play my favorite, Storming New Caprica, but the show was still amazing. I cannot ever recall seeing a conductor jump around and headbanging like a heavy metal guitarist. Better yet was when his brother Brendan was at the front of the stage playing his guitar and headbanging in time with his brother. Those two were really in synch. The crowd was so pumped up that they would not let the orchestra get away without an encore. In typical geek fashion (after all, this was a geek fest with “Frank Off!” t-shirts a plenty), the way to get them out for the encore was chat “So say we all!”.

If you live in Los Angeles or will be lucky enough to be here Tuesday, April 15th, they will be performing again. Sunday’s show was sold out so move quickly!

Amazon Links:
Battlestar Galactica: Season One
Battlestar Galactica: Season Two
Battlestar Galactica: Season Three