NJTV previews Legend of Zelda concert at NJPAC

NJTV’s Madeline Orton chats with the producers of The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses ahead of the August 10 production of the orchestral show at NJPAC, which features the NJSO.

The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses is a live orchestral concert comprised of music from the game spun into symphonic movements, and set against a background of its video sequences …

As lifelong fans of film composers like Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams, and now working in the film/TV business themselves, [Jeron] Moore and [Chad] Seiter wanted to share Zelda with the world the way they had always heard it. “We’re both really, really passionate about orchestral music,” said Seiter. “We chose symphonic movements because a symphony is basically an orchestral method of storytelling.”

Recently celebrating its 25th anniversary, the Zelda franchise offers a lot of material to work with. “It takes place in a magical world,” said Seiter. “You expect soaring strings and French horns and woodwinds. You expect the whole picture. When picking out pieces, we musically laid down the story merely in chronological order. Then we started going through them and seeing what puzzle pieces would fit together in making symphonic movements.”

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For those who are already video game lovers, the concert means a trip down memory lane. Marc Sequeira is a lecturer and coordinator for the Game Development Program at NJIT who has worked on video game design in some form since the late 1980s. “Some of those soundtracks are special because…we grew up with them,” he explained. “I think Legend of Zelda sort of sounds operatic. Sounds like Tristan und Isolde or something like that… The actual music itself would stand up.”

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Seiter is confident that all concertgoers will take away something from the experience. “I think people leave our show feeling really great about it because we didn’t show them a video game, we showed them a story — which is something everyone can understand.”

Read the full preview at njtvonline.org.