Sat, Feb 23, 2008
Movies & Music
Posted to Media category
originally posted Feb 19, 2008
This weekend was the Boulder International Film Festival, so the Philharmonic concert was exploring relationships between classical music and the cinema.
Before the intermission, they played a violin concerto by Korngold, who was an influential composer of film scores in the 30s and 40s. He established some of the traditional relationships between movies and music that were later used by composers like John Williams.
The concert notes suggested that it isn't so much that Korngold's concert pieces sound like movie music, as that movie music sounds like Korngold.
Personally, I find that a lot of 20th century classical music sounds like movie music. The previous conductor at the Phil included a lot of 20th century pieces and I could always tell symphonies that were written after movies were invented. I don't know what it is that I'm hearing as the difference between the 20th Century symphonies and the older works. It may be something about the transitions between different thematic material within the piece.
The second half of the Phil concert was Prokofiev's Cantata of music he had written for Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky. I like choir music and the music was well performed, but the overall event was a little disappointing. They had a narrator and showed (silent) excerpts of the film between the seven sections of the Cantata, but it would have been better if they showed more of the film, and showed it while the music was being performed.
I went to the Circle Bar during intermission and did some meat-space lurking. It turns out, the drinks and hors d'oeuvres are free for donors. Instead of buying a chunk of banana bread and a bottle of water from the regular caterers, I had a comfortably small cup of 7-Up, a small piece of brownie, and a few savory little puff-pastry things. They had other sweet things, too, and crudites, but I'm not sure I'm willing to risk trying to swallow raw veggies in public. And given a choice between macaroons and artichoke-stuffed puffs I'll take artichokes every time.