On July 18, 2002, the London Symphony Orchestra sat down in Studio 1 at Abbey Road and played the score for a video game. The game was Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness. The composer in the room was Peter Connelly, who had written the music together with his colleague Martin Iveson.
Connelly had come to Tomb Raider by a side door. He wrote the boss music for Tomb Raider III. In his own words, years later: 'TR4 was my first TR project (apart from the boss music I composed for TR3).' That project was Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, released in 1999. He scored its follow-up, Chronicles, in 2000.
The Angel of Darkness was a different scale of job. The series was moving to PlayStation 2, and the score was to be played by a real orchestra, not built from samples. According to a press report at the time, Connelly and Iveson wrote it over about three months, and 82 members of the London Symphony Orchestra played it.
The recording took place in Studio 1 on that Thursday. The engineer, Pete Cobbin, was responsible for the recording itself and mixed the material the next day, July 19. Connelly later described the room in plain terms: it was 'the beautiful sounding Studio 1 at Abbey Road Studios.' Nothing in the sources we found says how many hours the session lasted, and we have not guessed.
What he did say about the day is short. 'Working with the LSO at Abbey Road Studios was a highlight,' he said in a 2025 interview. And: 'everything happened really fast (there was a lot to do).' He remembers the studio café, 'which is quite probably the only time we could properly wind down.'
The game came out in 2003. Connelly was not much involved in how it was made. 'Being in a studio, on my own, I wasn't that involved in the daily politics and troubles that might have gone on,' he said of those years. Later he left Core Design. 'The VERY last thing I did at Core was create SFX and music edits (initially from AOD) for Anniversary,' he said.
Then came other work. He moved on to other studios and other games, and the three Core Design scores he had written stayed where they were, finished and released, in the form the schedule had allowed.
In 2018 he went back to them. He announced Tomb Raider: The Dark Angel Symphony, a crowdfunded album with the arranger Richard Niles, who would take the music from the fourth, fifth and sixth games 'to a whole new level.' It was to be, in Connelly's words, 're-arranged and re-recorded to take full advantage of 2018's technology.' The music he had played to an orchestra in a single July of 2002 was going into a room again. What is it you finished in a hurry, that you can still hear?