Murder most melodious: a ‘Murdoch Mysteries’ episode gets a special Toronto Symphony debut

Those who attend Roy Thomson Hall this weekend for the pairing of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the popular CBC TV program “Murdoch Mysteries” will get two “whodunits” for the price of one.

There’s the obvious lure and a history-making one at that: fans at the concerts will exclusively preview the Season 16 episode “Murder in F Major” on Friday and Saturday before it airs on March 20, and in a three-dimensional format as the score for the show will be performed live by the symphony as the action unfolds on a big screen.

But there’s a second mystery that will be solved for the benefit of patrons: a look behind the TV show’s curtain that explains how the music is composed and then synchronized and locked into a scene, as demonstrated by the show’s Gemini and Canadian Screen Award-winning composer, Rob Carli.

“I’m doing two scoring demos where you take a scene and I explain the process of scoring to the audience,” Carli said over Zoom earlier this week. “We take a two-minute scene — and we’ll be playing it without any music at all, which is what I get as a composer — and then we think about what themes to use and I start playing piano.

“Then I create a ‘tinkle’ track where I play piano along with the picture. Then we hear the cue with just piano and build the orchestra around the cue. I’ll say, ‘Let’s hear what the strings sound like’ and bring them in; same with the brass, the winds and then the whole orchestration.”

While the process promises to be fascinating, it won’t truly illuminate how quickly his compositions for this episode were cobbled together.

“As a composer, you don’t really start working on something until you have a locked picture,” Carli explained. Although the episode was shot in January, the picture wasn’t “locked” until Feb. 10.

Since the deadline for getting the music “printed, orchestrated, bound and published” for the TSO musicians to perform was Feb. 23, Carli had basically two weeks to write approximately 30 minutes of accompanying score for a show that lasts 43 minutes (it stretches to an hour on TV due to commercial breaks).

Considering that composers of a TV score rarely receive live feedback while their work is being performed, is Carli feeling a little nervous?

“I’m not sleeping as well as normally,” he chuckled. “But it’s from excitement. I’m pretty confident in the show, in the performer and the players. These are all well-oiled machines.”

Of course, the music and the previously unseen episode are just two of the highlights of this combined Shaftesbury and TSO presentation.

Hosting the event? None other than Detective William Murdoch himself — Yannick Bisson — and his trusty sidekick Jonny Harris as Constable George Crabtree.

Veteran actor Bisson, who has been on board as Detective Murdoch for 16 seasons, 269 episodes and a series that currently airs in more than 120 countries, says he was at another orchestral event in Kitchener when he realized how many lives the series has touched.

“All of a sudden I heard the ‘Murdoch’ theme being pumped out by the orchestra and it just choked me up,” he admitted in a separate phone interview. “I was thinking, ‘Holy cow, here’s something I’ve been part of for a decade and a half … a big part of my life.

“I’ve spent time in my 30s and 40s, and now my 50s on this show; invested everything I have in making this great, and there’s this sort of physical representation of that in my mind and I got really choked up.

“So the audience response from a packed house, it made clear just how far this show reaches and how many people it’s touched. I had no idea until that very moment.”

Bisson can’t pinpoint one exact aspect of “Murdoch” that figures in its global popularity.

“There’s been 10,000 different things that people have said along the way,” said Bisson, who will host a “Murdoch Mysteries” Q&A with his wife, Shantelle, at a ticketed event on Saturday afternoon.

“We have historical references; we have geographical stuff; we have early CSI stuff. We have romance, but I think the touchstone that we always go back to is that we have a little tiny touch of tongue-in-cheek and we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”

With Toronto’s Lucas Waldin handling TSO conducting duties, Bisson said he and Harris will be there to provide some “personality.”

“Jonny and I will be hosting and we will be kibitzing a bit and having a good time,” he promised.

How did something like this come together?

There was a bit of a precedent, explained Christina Jennings, founder, president and chairman of Shaftesbury, production home to such series as “Frankie Drake Mysteries,” “Hudson & Rex” and “Departure.”

“What do you do as a producer when you’ve got a show that’s run 16 years — the ratings are not slipping — to keep it top of mind?” Jennings asked rhetorically. “The thought was, ‘How could we extend it beyond television?’”

During the pandemic, she and Matthew Rosen, then CEO of the Toronto Symphony, came up with the idea of a one-hour special, “A Music Lover’s Guide to Murdoch Mysteries,” made for Acorn TV.

After that success, Jennings pitched an idea through Carli to Olga Mychajluk, then head of artistic planning at the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, of hosting a “Murdoch Mysteries” night with the orchestra playing the score to a Season 7 episode.

The event drew more than 2,000 people and Jennings knew she had something special.

“That night in Kitchener, we sat in the pub and we realized that we’re going to need do this in Toronto for two nights,” Jennings recalled. “We probably needed to have it be a more current episode and we went to the CBC and said, ‘What if it’s an episode that had never been seen before?’ They said yes.”

Eighteen months later, the event is also part of the TSO’s centennial celebration, though it’s worth noting the nascent formation of the symphony actually occurred around 1910-11 and was disrupted by the First World War before the TSO’s official birth in 1923.

Jennings said she can’t wait for the weekend to arrive.

“Because it’s on the big screen — and we shot it to be on the big screen — it’s got some really good cinematic quality,” she said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to be disappointed and Carli’s score is stupendous. Hopefully everyone will be getting a fan experience that’s unique and that they’ll remember.”

Oh, and the plot of “Murder in F Major?”

At a lavish reception celebrating the formation of the city’s new symphony orchestra in 1910, the celebration is cut short when the ensemble’s founder, Victor Serrano, is found dead.

Luckily, Detective Murdoch is on the case, so you know the murderer will be revealed before the program’s credits roll.

Whatever the outcome, with all the bells and whistles being accorded this presentation, it promises to be a murder most pleasant.

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