… and get a load of the bass flutes!
Jarrod Radnich on piano
I won’t see the final movie for a while yet, as I’m not one to bother with long lines and lots of noise … but for those of you who are getting in the mood … here you go. Just a way to get you started:
old film projector of Esther Cinema, in Cinema Hotel, Tel Aviv
(By user: idobi (user: idobi) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0], via Wikimedia Commons)
Movies really can’t exist without music. Or most movies can’t. Even when they were silent music was played. So … think you know what the best movie music is? You can see a list of the top 100 and see if you agree with it.
I know absolutely nothing about some movie called “The Tree of LIfe”. Heck, I have to confess I don’t even know who Terrence Malick is. But someone has put together a list of the music used in that film.
And they say classical music is dead.
… can you guess? (At the beginning of this clip.)
I just finished the film “Tous les matins du monde”. The visuals were lovely, but boy do I have issues with music & movies!
(Btw, if you watch it, it isn’t rated, but there is nudity so if you are uncomfortable with that, please don’t watch!)
Listening to the music in the movie was wonderful. Thank you, Jordi Savall!
The film is set in a beautifully re-imagined Venice of the early 1920s, where people have gramophone heads. A young composer called Hero Wasabi lives with Jacuzzi his loyal oboe-playing cat, and is in preparation for the upcoming Abacus Scroll music competition. But when his piano and composition are destroyed by a musical rival, the unscrupulous Count Telefino, Wasabi may be running out of time to write that winning melody.
Yep … seems like one I should see, eh? And I think I need a reed making cat, myself!
The headline:
Madonna ‘Writing Classical Music for W.E.’
And then it says something about a “classic score” along with:
The movie is due to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France next month and reports now suggest Madonna is hard at work writing the soundtrack for “W.E.” with producer William Orbit ahead of the picture’s big debut.
Another pop star trying to “cross over” to the other side? Hmm?
… I can’t, in fact, remember the last one I saw in a theater. Hmmm. Maybe it was (embarrassed shrug) that James Cameron movie that was winning awards a few years ago … what was it called again?
BUT …! :
First announced early last year, Dustin Hoffman‘s directorial debut—an adaptation of Ronald Harwood‘s stage comedy “Quartet”—is now set to begin production this fall after the actor-turned-director wraps up on the David Milch-backed HBO horse-racing drama “Luck.”
The project is shaping to be a real actor’s film boasting a powerful leading trio with English thespians Maggie Smith, Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay for the story of “four retired opera singers living in a retirement home, who decide to sing once more at a gala concert to celebrate Verdi’s birthday.” And it looks like some more accomplished talent may be joining the ranks: the original play’s scribe Harwood, who won an Oscar for his work on Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist,” is adapting for the screen.
Yep. I’ll be wanting to see that one!
I read about it here.
The producer who inspired a fashion for Shakespeare in recent British cinema now plans to bring the operatic work of Mozart to mainstream film audiences.
Twenty years ago Stephen Evans produced Henry V, starring Kenneth Branagh, despite scepticism from investors and distributors who predicted it would be a commercial failure. In fact the film won two Oscar nominations for Branagh as best director and best actor and is still making money. Now Evans is banking on a romantic comedy inspired by Mozart’s Così Fan Tutte – and with a Mozart soundtrack – becoming a similarly unexpected hit.
The film, just finished and provisionally titled First Night, is a feelgood British drama. In it Richard E Grant, star of Gosford Park, plays a wealthy businessman who assembles a troupe of singers to stage Così Fan Tutte in his stately home. At a test screening last week the audience loved it.
Evans said: “People who didn’t know opera were more excited than the people who did. The music is so wonderful, so lyrical. People uninterested in opera found themselves loving the music.”
Some years back I saw the movie Cosi, about some mentally ill patients putting on the opera Così fan tutte.
Guess Così is movie worthy, eh?
Um … Sarah Brightman is in it. I will keep my comments to myself. Aside from that sentence.
I read about the movie here.
Of course nothing can beat the actual opera and the exquisite music.
Operaplot is over tomorrow. I’ve submitted a whopping 17 entries so far. And I’ll do more. It’s been fun to put them together, but what I’m sure was the winning entry popped in and then out of my head. Rats! If it doesn’t come to me by tomorrow, I guess it’ll have to wait until next year. If it’s done again next year.
Several people have complimented my efforts, and I have to say it really made me blush (well, not literally) and get all warm and fuzzy inside (again, not literally). I love wordplay, and I love opera. So getting positive words about what I’ve done is quite “happifying”. (Literally.) ;-)
Meanwhile — since I won’t post all my entries here until tomorrow — enjoy a bit of Darth Giovanni. (Thanks, Mona!)
This is fantastic publicity, immeasurable. What comes from this is recognition on an unbelievable scale. Some of the nicest sequences in the film are the chase through our building. Of course, it’s not a very good film otherwise.
-David Pountney, artistic director of the Bregenz opera festival in Austria
Hmmm. I’m gonna guess the Bond people aren’t terribly appreciative of that quote, but I guess he can say what he wants to say as he enjoys what “We charged what it cost and a little bit more.”
I read it here, and I’d blogged about it before, including the vido clip. I do love that part. I have yet to see the entire movie. Knowing me I won’t until it’s available for rental.
It didnt take long before I’d realised that this is no ordinary concert broadcast. The film basically provides a deconstruction of individual members of the Berliner Philharmoniker, through a series of interviews, peeling away the layers of confidence and exuberance which they portray through their concerts. Slowly, the film reveals some of the inner fears, tension, internal contradictions, and sometimes ghosts of the forgotten past. A horn player relating how she was “Ms Unpopularity” in school, a second violin speaks of “the struggles of not being able to pick up the subtlies of playing in an orchestra which had developed a rich culture”, of being ashamed of his asian heritage and not being about to assimilate into everybody else. The principal oboist shared how he used to stutter as a teenager, and how his instrument became his medium to becoming mainstream. Similar sentiments echoed through several more members from the various sections of the orchestra. Rattle speaks of the Jekyll and Hyde within his musicians. The concertmaster speaks of the sound of orchestra back in Karajan’s days still ringing in his ears and his continual quest in search of that sound again. The level of sheer frankness and directness, at times an overload of information, is just overwhelming and leaves much food for thought.
Hmmm. Did every musician get into this to make up for some weakness?
The quote above is regarding a movie, Trip To Asia: The Quest for Harmony, about the Berlin Phil and Simon Rattle. Any readers seen it?
The film’s unrehearsed style extended to its use of music. Demme had long wanted to “provide the musical dimension of a movie without traditionally scored music.” And as it turned out, Rachel is getting married to a music producer. And Rachel’s father is a music industry bigwig.
Demme reasoned that the wedding weekend — taking place at the family home — would be a congregation of musicians playing more or less nonstop for 72 hours. He enlisted friends — New Orleans-born jazz saxophonist Donald Harrison and Palestinian violin virtuoso Zafer Tawil — to compose the score and play it on the spot while Demme shot the movie.
I actually am interested in seeing this movie (Not that I ever actually go see movies. But I have a list of the ones I want to see. That’s about as close as I usually get!). But … musicians … heh … we sometimes like silence. And if we are talking, many of us prefer no background music. Music requires listening.
And can you imagine musicians playing “more or less nonstop for 72 hours”? Yikes! Of course the musicians in the movie aren’t playing “classical” music, so maybe folks who play jazz and Arabic music actually do play all day and night. I can’t speak for those genres. Heck, I can only speak for myself. And even then I sometimes get it wrong. :-)
There’s a documentary of the making of Dr. Atomic, called Wonders Are Many. I was looking at the site to see if this was using the San Francisco Opera production. (What else would it use, eh?) It appears to be the case, but I couldn’t find a place that gave the San Francisco Opera orchestra any mention at all. I hope I’m just missing it. (That’s easy for me to do.) It would be a shame not to mention the orchestra, don’t you think?
