Program Notes - Great Movies! Grand Pianos!

Program Notes
October 8, 2011
By Composer in Residence
Bruce Brown

The JSO will expand the boundaries of classical music programming with its 2011-12 season, which Maestro Osmond has dubbed “New Horizons.” The orchestra will feature music from some surprising sources, along with enduring favorites, to provide richly-varied concert experiences for its audience, and perhaps even to challenge some of our suppositions about what music should be considered classical in the first place.

Pianist Rich Ridenour will join the orchestra for the season opener, “Great Movies ... Grand Pianos,” to perform some of the most memorable music from the silver screen.

Film music borrowed freely from the classical repertoire to create its magic, but unquestionably, some of the finest music of the past hundred years was written expressly for the movies.

The earliest movies were silent, of course, and local pianists or organists often played in the theaters as the films were shown. By 1914, film companies were providing full length scores by classical composers Louis Gottschalk and Victor Herbert that could be performed with their productions

The first movies with sound tracks were shorts and the sound was relatively crude. In 1926, the feature film Don Juan, starring Lionel Barrymore, appeared with background music and sound effects. Hollywood soon figured out how to synchronize the sound with the picture, and the age of “talkies” began with The Jazz Singer in 1927.

In the thirties, a flood of musicians, artists, writers and other people who dared to think for themselves fled Europe and came to the United States to escape Nazi persecution. Many classically-trained musicians were among the refugees, and many settled in Hollywood to write music for the growing film industry.

In Hollywood’s golden age composers like Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers wrote wonderful songs for the stage and screen that became huge popular hits.

In the decades that followed, movie music was influenced by almost every conceivable musical genre and style.



Captain Blood

One of the most brilliant of the refugee film composers was Erich Korngold (1897-1957) who seemed to be rising to the very pinnacle of fame. Korngold was amazingly gifted from a very early age. His father published three of his compositions when he was twelve years old, and musicians around the world soon lined up to perform his music.

Korngold wrote his first original film score for Captain Blood, a 1935 swashbuckler featuring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. Within a year his music for Anthony Adverse won an Oscar, and he won a second Oscar for The Adventures of Robin Hood.

Korngold’s film scores were enormously influential and firmly established the rich, expressive sound so characteristics of movies in “the good old days.” Sadly, when he tried to return to the concert stage after the war, the public’s taste had changed. By the time of his death, he felt he had been almost forgotten.



Warsaw Concerto

The British composer Richard Addinsell (1904-1977) wrote The Warsaw Concerto for the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight, which was released in the United States as Suicide Squadron. The hero of the film is a shell-shocked combat pilot who is also a skilled pianist and has composed a beautiful concerto that he plays to soothe his troubled spirit. Eventually, with his courage renewed, he returns to the battle against the Nazi occupation of Poland.

Addinsell was hired for the project when the producers were unable to convince Sergei Rachmaninoff to write music for the film or allow them to use any of his existing works. Addinsell’s music was orchestrated by Roy Douglas, another British composer and arranger with several film projects to his credit.

The relatively brief Warsaw Concerto, with its unique single-movement design, has become a favorite showpiece for concert programs.



Rhapsody in Blue

George Gershwin (1898-1937) wrote original scores for a handful of films, but he was infuriated when 20th Century Fox rejected most of his music for the film Delicious in 1929. He refused to write movie music until just before his death 8 years later. He didn’t live to see his Academy Award nomination for the song They Can’t Take That Away from Me, written for the film Shall We Dance. Gershwin’s music has been incorporated into countless films since then, including An American in Paris, which was based on Gershwin’s 1928 tone poem of the same name and won the Oscar for best picture in 1951.

On January 3rd, 1924, Gershwin was startled to read an article in the New York Tribune in which the famous band leader Paul Whiteman said Gershwin was writing a new jazz concerto for his orchestra. Gershwin liked the idea, but the concert was barely a month away! Gershwin set to work immediately and wrote his enormously popular Rhapsody in Blue in a frantic rush. He ended up improvising several passages during the premiere in the Aeolian Concert Hall on 43rd Street.

Rhapsody in Blue established Gershwin’s reputation as an important composer and quickly became one of the most recognizable and beloved monuments of American music.