Star Trek 50th The Ultimate Voyage in Concert

Tonight after work I headed out to a concert.. but it's not you typical concert.. this was for Star Trek 50th The Ultimate Voyage in concert at the Pantages theater. I enjoyed this concert with my buddy Adam (who is a huge Star Trek fan as well)... It was two hours of awesome music set to The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise footage as well as the 12 movies. And for an added surprise Michael Dorn (Worf) was the narrator. 

It's the brainchild of conductor Justin Freer and his producing partner Brady Beaubien, whose CineConcerts company does live-to-picture concerts of complete films, including "The Godfather," "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "Gladiator." Paramount and CBS entrusted them with the idea of a 50th-anniversary musical tribute.

Freer will conduct an 85-piece orchestra in music by 13 composers, including themes by Oscar winners Jerry Goldsmith (who scored five of the movies, starting with "Star Trek: The Motion Picture"), James Horner ("Star Trek II" and "III"), Leonard Rosenman ("Star Trek IV") and Michael Giacchino (the recent "Trek" reboot) and Emmy winners Dennis McCarthy and Jay Chattaway, who together scored more than two-thirds of the four later "Trek" series ("The Next Generation," "Deep Space Nine," "Voyager" and "Enterprise").

We were lucky enough to have several people who actually worked on Star Trek over the years in the audience including the wonderful Nichelle Nicoles who played Uhura in the original series and movies.  We also had three guest composer who came out and conducted their piece music of music. And for the life of me I can't remember who they were, but I think I have it written down somewhere so check back later and I'll edit this blog post and add the information.

Overall it was pretty amazing, the song selections were great, I like how they had short segments of each series. The lightening was amazing for example when the Borg music started everything went green on stage. Some of the narrated bits were a bit cheesy and they did repeat of few of the scenes. What was great is that the music would suck you in that you'd forget that it was live.

One stand out moment for me was when they played the flute song from "inner light". It's one of my favorite pieces of all the Star Trek music and the reason I want to learn to play the flute. Such a beautiful piece and I kept looking for the person playing flute but couldn't find him but I'm happy at the end they had him stand so we could applaud him for his amazing work.

I'm happy that I got my ticket to see this.. it was worth every penny. What a great way to celebrate the 50th anniversary of such an amazing franchise.