Jessica Gethin will make her Canberra Symphony Orchestra debut with CSO at the Cinema, a one-night-only concert that includes music from the above-mentioned films and several others.

Gethin, who is based in Perth, says the program was already set when she was approached to conduct, and that she has already conducted some of the music in the concert.

She says the principal purpose of film music - as with music for opera and musical theatre - is to create feeling.

While sometimes musical cues are by necessity short, she believes, "Good film music stands alone, absolutely" and can provide, among other things, "excitement, drive, a journey through different styles" as well as "exploring the sense of place and time and emotion for us", especially if we have seen the film that is having its score played,.

She says a good film score can be played on its own as originally composed - usually in sections - or arranged into suites and medleys of different themes.

Veteran composer John Williams - who has been nominated for 52 Oscars and won five, among many other awards - is represented by three works.

In the CSO concert, the suite of music from the Star Wars films - with orchestral influences including Gustav Holst's The Planets - includes the Main Title, Leia's Theme, and Yoda's Theme.

Williams frequently employs leitmotifs. Gethin says the composer, throughout his Stars Wars scores, uses "60 or 70 different themes to represent central characters and ideas".

Another Williams score - this one arranged by Jerry Brubaker - is the Harry Potter Symphonic Suite - a medley of themes from the film with moods ranging from the mysterious to the humorous.

CSO Concertmaster Kirsten Williams will be performing the violin solos from Williams' Schindler's List and the Romance from Dmitri Shostakovich's score for the 1955 Soviet historical drama The Gadfly. Gethin has performed the latter in her other role as a violinist.

Another soloist will be principal oboeist Megan Pampling. She will be featured in Gabriel's Oboe, the main theme from prolific Italian composer Ennio Morricone's score for The Mission (1986).

"It's one of the iconic themes from film music - oboeists around the world have played it."

Over the course of a long career Bernard Herrmann wrote music for many notable films, from Citizen Kane (1941) to Taxi Driver (1976). One of his most fruitful collaborations was with director Alfred Hitchcock for whom he scored several films, including Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959) and the film featured in this concert, Psycho (1960).

"It's just the strings," Gethin says.

Herrmann was quoted as saying he wanted to write "a black and white score" for the low-budget black and white movie. The cue he wrote for the shower murder scene - in which Hitchcock originally wanted to have no music - is instantly recognisable, much quoted, imitated and parodied.

"It's haunting and challenging," Gethin says of the score which was written to be performed without vibrato, making it sound "cold and glassy", although some performances add varying amounts of vibrato to create a slightly warmer and more expressive sound. She will wait until rehearsals to decide how much vibrato - if any - the CSO performance will have.

Two of the composers represented in the program are Australian. Leah Curtis wrote the music for writer-director Fawaz Al-Matrouk's short film To Rest in Peace (2011), based on a grim true incident in occupied Kuwait in 1990. The CSO will perform a suite from the music arranged specifically for the orchestra that features Middle Eastern instruments such as the oud, duduk and dumbek. Nigel Westlake's score for the family film Paper Planes (2014) is "a beautiful work", Gethin says, "with a lot of movement" and "huge soaring lines", all the better to convey the feeling of paper planes in flight at a world championship.

Ending the concert is a piece not originally written for a film. George Gershwin's 1928 symphonic tone poem An American in Paris gave its name to the Oscar-winning 1951 musical. It accompanied the climactic ballet in which the sets and costumes referenced French painters including Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec.

"It's so much fun," Gethin says, while acknowledging, "It's not an easy play."

The work is a jazzy showpiece for the orchestra, with moods ranging from the lively to the romantic, and features taxi horns in the percussion section to evoke Parisian traffic.

Gethin studied at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and has had an extensive career as a violinist and conductor. She's conducted operas, ballets and orchestral concerts in Australia and internationally as well as scores for films. At the time of writing she was scheduled to conduct a concert celebrating the 30^th anniversary of Edith Cowan University before coming to Canberra to rehearse.

It's her first time working with the CSO, but she hopes it's not the last.

CSO at the Cinema is on at Llewellyn Hall on Saturday, August 7 at 7.30pm. Bookings: cso.org.au.