When the composer Justin Hurwitz conducted the first La La Land show on May 26, 2017 as a concert at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, the audience numbered 17,000. The next night is even 18,000. Since then, the tour has gone through many different parts of the planet and is a huge hit.

On 7 December it became clear that La La Land also had thousands of fans in Bulgaria, and secondly, there are also musicians who can make the picture full, multi-lingual and colorful – with its own handwriting and dose of improvisation. And this is the choice of Justin Hurwitz and the conductor of 32 more performances before Sofia – Eric Oksner. He is a young, very positive and energetic New Yorker with his own classic chamber orchestra. But his specialty is precisely the performances of films with live music – before Hurwitz, who boasted his conducting lesson, Oxner also worked with Howard Shore on The Lord of the Rings.

Still, the expectations were more special because La La Land is a musical. He somehow raised the love and admiration for the “golden times” of the movie musicals, so he also earned hundreds of awards as a production, and for the actors in the lead roles Rayan Gosling and Emma Stone singing and dancing, and Gosling even specially learned to play the piano to be more authentic in its image, and original music and song. And so – six Academy Awards and seven Golden Globes, a total of 212 awards of 248 nominations. This is a lot of luggage that falls on the shoulders of the musicians in the various countries who have to “get in the shoes” of the most-respected staff of Hollywood specialists. And here in Bulgaria we are accustomed to saying that for a musical we do not have enough capacity either as singers, or as dancers, and somehow as musicians.

The National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the solo jazzmen were brilliant – as a style, as an ensemble and as a whole sound. I have to admit that this film-concert was the first such experience for me and at first I always wanted to see who is performing a certain theme – whether it is the flute of Yavor Zhelev, the trombone of Vili Stoyanov, the double bass of Dimitar Shanov or the drums of Rumen Boyadjiev- son, and whether the solo trumpet is on Peter of Macedon or Todor Bakardzhiev … and gradually the overall picture, the combination of vision and music so lured me that I forgot about it. There is hardly a bigger compliment, I think.

The parity places really high demands – combining classical music with jazz and so on. “Broadway Style”. I have to mention that in Sofia, apart from the stars on the screen, there was also a star in the orchestra and that was the pianist Stefan Vrachev, whom we know as a member of the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra but also from many different projects. The La La Land pianist has a major role, and he performs her “as an Oscar.” And it is no coincidence that after each song and after the final inscriptions, the applause was stormy and prolonged, and the conductor Eric Oksnar especially expressed his admiration by Stefan Vrachev. Hours later, at the address of the pianist, praise and admiration was also played by his colleagues-musicians.

It is no coincidence that hundreds of film productions prefer to record their music in Sofia – the radio operator offers them more, not less than world level.