Yes, you read it right. The man who brought Hannibal Lecter and other vivid portrayals to the big screen is also a composer.

He has doodled at the piano for years and even penned the odd film score. But let's not get too excited about it.

For this grandiose shindig, professional composer and orchestrator Stephen Barton gave those keyboard sketches and ideas shape and an orchestral dimension, and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Michael Seal were on hand to perform the results.

With extracts from music composed by others for the movies he's starred in, the programme illustrated that film music is written purely to enhance.

Played on its own without the images, it can be depressingly bland and meaningless. That includes the Richard Robbins score for The Remains of the Day, in which Hopkins gave the performance of his life as the butler Stevens, caught up in political events he can barely understand.

Other gobbets, such as Alex Heffes's lurid score for the 2011 film The Rite, only confirmed that as well as outstanding films Hopkins has canned a few pancakes.

As a composer, he belongs to the same tradition of scene-painter in sound as the others though on a less adventurous scale. He has a nice line in sentimental reverie (Evesham Fair and Margam) and can also raise the stakes (Amerika and 1947) His fans loved it, gave him standing ovations and must have been surprised by his musical talents. The whole concept probably represented the late satisfactions of vanity. And few would have begrudged him those.