Month: March 2018

Film’s an art form that is an amalgam of art forms. Very different pursuits – acting, writing, photography and musical composition – play essential roles in nearly every film (- there are some great films with no musical score). A truly great film – when each aspect is great and fits with the others – is a sort of miracle, it has always seemed to me: my experiences with large groups of people suggests the more people, the more chances for botches. Some very good movies will be especially strong in two or three of those aspects. But if just one aspect is flat-out poor, then the movie fails. 

Offhand, it is difficult to think of a movie that has been killed just by a crappy musical score, although I’d say – for me – almost all of the movies I’ve seen with John Williams’ scores have suffered as a result, especially Schindler’s List.

(I am of course aware the wider public loves Williams’ themes and pays to hear John Williams’ scores played by live orchestras at pops concerts while the movie plays behind on huge screens. In fact, I would say that supports my point. The wider public thinks Beyonce has talent and is civil rights leader. The Star Wars theme was the worst thing that ever happened to soundtracks, but I digress… or I’ve digressed enough…)

Most of the music on this Mixtape is drawn from the list of what I consider to be truly great films at the end of this post… There are a couple of exceptions in the mix – outstanding music from films I do NOT consider all that great – Morricone’s theme from Days of Heaven being the prime example – or films, like the 1993 Russian film version of The Master and Margarita, I haven’t seen at all. (Well, I watched a few minutes on Youtube; there’s a 2005 adaptation that looks better.)

Many of the century’s great composers – e.g. Shostakovich and Schnittke – wrotes scores of scores, not unlike the way 19th Century composers churned out ballets, except maybe a bit more detached. Among the Shostakovich scores I’ve heard, two – Hamlet‘s and The Gadfly‘s – stand out as worth repeated listenings. The others – and I’ve hardly heard them all, as he wrote dozens – are among the least interesting things I’ve heard from him. (The piece on the mix is sort of a cheat – it’s the prologue (or title music) to Katarina Izmailova, the 1966 film version of his opera Lady MacBeth of Mtsensk… I think it is unique to the movie…)

There are also great composers who focused almost exclusively on film scores, most notably two Americans – Elmer Bernstein and Bernard Herrmann – and two Italians – Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota – as well as a handful of Japanese composers. It is rare that their works – soundtrack or otherwise – turn up on concert programs or blanched-out classical music radio shows.

Whatever, I think orchestras would do well to play more soundtrack stuff in concert – other than John Williams, that is. I’ve often thought that if I had input into a regional symphony’s programming, I would have one Ennio Morricone night every year. I know I’d pay to hear the Asheville Symphony play the “Spaghetti Suite” I fashioned for this mixtape…

Regarding the music on the mix, one more thing: somebody needs to put out Margaret Chardier’s soundtrack to The Transfiguration. I included a piece of hers that is from a sort-of film – concert footage interspersed w/ shots of offal – you can watch on Youtube, called Bestial Burden.

Finally, a note about the list of films that follows the playlist… It is a mixture of what some would call oddities or obscura along with some of those bonafide classics – like Citizen Kane and Bicycle Thieves – that appear on all critics’ best-of lists because their brilliance is undeniable. There is a unifying thread – or vibe – some people might pick up on immediately, or not. I tend to gravitate to the dark side, let’s put it that way. I love films that do what Shostakovich or Schnittke does with music. Which is to say, I love movies that reach high, create a world that is unassailably real, and aren’t afraid of the weirdness or bleakness of human existence.

I ranked the movies to make a Top 40, which is sort of preposterous. (What makes it most preposterous is all the movies I haven’t seen…) There is, though, a genuine 3-way tie for first – three movies I love fanatically and equally; after that, the list is pretty arbirtrary. All of the movies in the Top 10 are ones I’ve watched many times (except for The Transfiguration, which I first saw a few months ago and Irreversible, which I doubt I will, or can, ever watch again.), in some cases ten or twelve times. The list, with a couple obvious exceptions, is pretty much the syllabus for the film history classes I got to teach in a couple high schools. Almost every other film in the Top 40 is one I’ve watched at least twice. They are all ones that moved me and I would encourage everyone to see, with a couple of exceptions vis-a-vis “everyone.”*

0:01:31
Elmer Bernstein
      Prologue from Desire Under the Elms (Delbert Mann; U.S.,1958)

0:06:04
Franz Schubert
      from Au Hazard Balthazar (Robert Bresson; France, 1966)

0:08:05
Johan Söderqvist
      from Låt den rätte komma in / Let the Right One In (Sweden, 2008) :
              Then We Are Together

0:10:42
Martin Luther
      from das Weisse Band /The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke; Austria, 2009)

0:13:29
Dmitri Shostakovich
      from Katarina Izmailova (Mikhail Shapiro; USSR, 1966)

0:16:29
Alfred Schnittke
      from The Master and Margarita (Yuri Kara, USSR, 1994)

0:21:25
Oleg Yanchenko
      from Come and See (Elem Klimov; USSR, 1985)

0:27:34
Unknown
      from The Music Room (Satyajit Ray; India, 1959)

0:29:59
Aleksandra Vrebalov
      from Beyond Zero, 1914-1918 (Bill Morrison; U.S., 2014)

0:32:22
Gyorgy Ligeti
      from 2001, A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick; U.S., 1968)

0:38:49
Aaron Copland
      from Our Town (Sam Wood; U.S.,1940)

____________________________________________

____________________________________________

0:49:49
Bernard Herrmann
      from Citizen Kane (Orson Welles; U.S., 1941)

0:52:24
Ennio Morricone
      from L’Istruttoria E Chiusa: Dimentichi ( ; Italy, 1971)

0:54:57
Margaret Chardier (aka Pharmakon)
      from Bestial Burden
            (because The Transfiguration‘s soundtrack has yet to be released…)

0:56:00
Art Zoyd
      from Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau; Germany,1922) : Harker’s Ride

0:59:59
Johan Söderqvist: Let the Right One In “Suite”
      from Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson; Sweden, 2008)

1:11:37
Ennio Morricone: “Spaghetti Suite”
      from For a Few Dollars More (Sergio Leone; Italy, 1960s)
              Ringo Rides Again
              Once Upon a Time in the West

1:18:30
Alessandro Cicognini
      from Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica; Italy, 1948)

1:25:54
Virgil Thomson
      from The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz; U.S.,1936) : Devastation

1:31:36
Basil Poledouris
      from Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven; U.S., 1997)

1:36:30
Michael Gordon
      from Decasia (Bill Morrison; U.S., 2002)

1:45:16
Ennio Morricone
      from Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick; U.S., 1978)

1:48:55
Lubos Fiser
      from Valerie & Her Week of Wonders (Czechoslovakia, 1970)

CC recommends…

1. Au Hazard Balthazar (Robert Bresson; France, 1966)
    Come and See (Elem Klimov; USSR, 1985)
    Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson; Sweden, 2008)
4. Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, U.S., 1940)
5. Touch of Evil (Orson Welles; U.S., 1958)
6. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (F.W. Murnau; Germany, 1922)
7. The Music Room (Satyagit Ray; Bengal, 1958)
8. The Grapes of Wrath (John Ford; U.S., 1940)
9. Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio de Sica; Italy, 1948)
10. The Transfiguration (Michael O’Shea; U.S., 2016)
11. Jeux Interdict (Forbidden Games) (René Clément; France, 1952)
12. Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick; U.S., 196 )
13. In This World (Michael Winterbottom; U.K., 2002)
14. Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven; U.S., 1997)
15. Salo (Pier Paolo Pasolini; Italy, 1977)
16. A Touch of Sin (Jia Zhangke; China, 2013)
17. Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey; U.S., 1937)
18. Desire Under the Elms (Delbert Mann; U.S., 1958)
19. Modern Times (Charlie Chaplin; U.S., 1936)
20. The Searchers (John Ford; U.S., 1956)

21. The Gospel According to St. Matthew (Pasolini; Italy, 1964)
22. Virgin Spring (Ingmar Bergman; Sweden, 1960)
23. Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel; U.S., 1957)
24. Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro; Spain, 2006)
25. The Man Who Wasn’t There (Coen Brothers; U.S., 2001)
26. Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsey; Scotland, 1999)
27. Jude (Winterbottom; U.K., 1996)
28. 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo; U.S., 2007)
29. Kes (Ken Loach; U.K., 1969)
30. Super (James Gunn; U.S., 2010)

31. Martyrs (Pascal Laugier; France, 2008)
32. Irreversible (Gaspar Noe; France, 2002)
33. Import/Export (Ulrich Siedl; Austria, 2007)
34. Pennies from Heaven (Herbert Ross; U.S., 1981)
35. Fire on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa; Japan, 1959)
36. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jireš; Czech, 1970)
37. Katarina Ismailova (Mikhail Shapiro; USSR, 1966)
38. Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis; U.S., 1950)
39. Monty Python & the Holy Grail (Terry Gilliam & Terry Jones; U.K., 1975)
40. … and pretty much every black & white Yasujirō Ozu movie I’ve seen. and most of the color ones.

* Squeamish people should avoid numbers 10, 15, 16, 28, and definitely 31 and 32.

Tesla Quartet @ Black Mountain College Museum
56 Broadway; Asheville, NC
Feb. 22, 2018

Perhaps because Asheville, North Carolina, is such a mecca for Midwestern retirees – AARP’s was among the first magazines with national reach to “discover” and then promote Asheville as a destination in the late ’90s – the appetite for “challenging” programming when it comes to classical music is limited. One might liken the local semi-pro symphony’s six regular season seasonal programs to a Bob Evans menu (meat loaf, mashed potatoes with mushroom gravy); the local NPR station’s 2-hour afternoon show seems to draw its playlists entirely from the CBS Masterworks series; and when touring chamber ensembles do pass through town, their sets rarely broach the Romantic period, let alone the Modern one. So this concert at the Black Mountain College Museum by the Tesla Quartet – including pieces by Bartok, Ravel (piano minuets transcribed by lead violinist Russ Snyder) and Hugo Kauder – a Viennese composer who fled the Nazis and wound up teaching polyphony at BMC in the mid- ’40s – was a rare opportunity for locals to hear 20th Century music played really, really well.

For non-New York Times readers, Asheville is a small city with a few claims to literary and artistic fame and is justly proud of Black Mountain College’s heritage. From 1933 to 1957, BMC was a radical attempt to reconfigure liberal arts education (no grades, graduate whenever you felt like it…), steered by some of the era’s celebrity thinkers across many disciplines: Buckminster Fuller, Josef Albers, Robert Rauschenberg and Allen Ginsberg were all on the faculty at one point. Ten to fifteen minutes from downtown in what might be a suburb if Asheville’s craggy topography allowed for eastward sprawl, BMC’s campus still stands, worse for wear, and has hosted a biannual outdoor roots- and world music festival for many years. More recently, a Black Mountain College Museum was established in a storefront on a relatively tourist-free block on downtown Asheville’s east side.

By far the best-known of the BMC music faculty was John Cage, who held his first “happening” at BMC. Less known, by a light year or so, was Hugo Kauder. Kauder (1888-1972) did not rate an entry in Norman Lebrecht’s Companion to 20th Century Music even though he was dead long before the book was published, nor have any reviews of his music appeared in the vast-in-scope bi-monthly Fanfare (to which I was gifted a subscription). He was prolific, producing over 300 works according to Wikipedia. His fourth string quartet was written in 1927, six years after his first, and he would go on to write a whopping 13 more. Kauder was the impetus for this show, it turns out. A member of the Hugo Kauder Society delivered an introduction in the form of a fan letter to the long-dead Kauder, and Kauder’s grandaughter, a woman in her golden years, also thanked everyone for coming.

The show began with four short madrigals by Carlo Gesualdo da Venossa (1566-1613), transcribed for string quartet (from five vocal parts) by  Snyder.  He told those assembled (perhaps 100 or so) that the poems whose words accompany the madrigals were profane and melancholic. I enjoyed the four pieces quite a bit, but waited too long (a week) to write this to say much about them otherwise…

The chance to hear a young, award-winning string quartet play a Bartok piece is what persuaded me to set aside my intense loathing of humanity – especially beer tourists, yuppie millennials and rich retirees, all of whom flock to Asheville like flies on an orange dog turd – and actually go downtown on a Friday night in the first place. Bartok trumps yups, in sum.

Though it didn’t come up, the Teslas are undoubtedly aware of Asheville’s other claim to 20th century art music fame — the brief stay by Bela Bartok in the winter of 1943-44. In his waning days and aware of it, Bartok worked hard while he was in Asheville – a last gasp during which he completed his third piano concerto (called “the Asheville Concerto when it is played here every now and again) for his wife Ditta to perform, worked on the viola concerto that was posthumously completed by associates, and (according to one account I read) revised his best-known late work, his Concerto for Orchestra. (You can visit and even stay in the room, which is now a bed and breakfast.)

The six string quartets Bartok left behind are of course regarded by most devotees of modern music as the equal of the Shostakovich set, which is to say the best the century produced. They are intense and intricate, full of swooping and skittering and plucking, verging on atonality for long passages, only to emerge in splashes of astounding melody. They present a challenge to players – even the most highly-rated recordings get demerits for being either a little too too serious (e.g., the Emerson Quartet’s set on Deutsche Grammophon) or a little too playful (the Tokyo Quartet’s set on ). On this evening, the Tesla took on the 3rd, also from 1927. It is by far the shortest of the six, a miniature relative to the others, but it is not a lesser work. It’s a kaleidoscopic and hard-focus 14 minutes without a slow movement. From watching the Teslas play up close – the first violinist on this piece, Michele Lie, could have elbowed me in the face had she chosen to do so – I’d say they strike the perfect balance of serious-to-playful for Bartok. Watching up close was amazing. I can still picture her fingers, like tendrils of a sea anemone in hyper-time lapse. The interplay of the foursome put me in mind of some of the best rock bands I’ve seen, and the music put me in mind of bats zinging around a lit billboard on a summer night, a billboard by my old apartment and across from a White Castle; I liked to watch whenever I could.

I am going to try to see the Tesla Quartet whenever I can. As I often say on my radio show, I have only been listening carefully to this kind of music for three years (and knew not much beforehand except the names Bartok and Shostakovich), but I know the Bartok quartets well enough to recognize awesome playing. I have three sets (the aforementioned two, plus one by the Takacs Quartet, which is also excellent), and I would buy one by the Tesla Quartet. Especially after seeing the manner in which they played the third. They electrified the crowded room.

I also thought that Bela Bartok, if his ghost might have wandered in from his Montford rooming house, would really enjoy seeing his music brought to ultravivid life in the 21st Century.

(Hoping I get to see them do this ^^^ on day.)

Following a Bartok quartet, especially a brilliantly-realized one, on a bill would be a tough slot for almost any piece of music, but the Kauder 4th Quartet was at least different enough that it did not represent a letdown by any means. While nowhere as challenging to the performers or audience, Kauder’s quartet was lyrical, playful and, if anything, a little too short. (The whole show was a little over an hour, which is just about right.) In his introduction to the piece, cellist Serafim Smigelskiy said it was a piece they had fun playing, and they had fun playing it at BMCM.

Without a heads-up (or perhaps a better knowledge of music), Kauder’s fourth string quartet would be difficult to identify as coming from an Austrian or, for that matter, a modernist. Its themes brought to mind England or Scotland – more Frank Bridge or Vaughan Williams-like in orientation than Berg or Webern. Those are, to me, exceedingly GOOD things, I should say – I enjoyed the piece enough that when I got home I downloaded a 2007 CD of Kauder’s first four string quartets on the Centaur label, very well played by the Euclid Quartet in a fine-sounding recording. The Tesla performance was just as good, for whatever that’s worth…

A pre-programmed encore was three Ravel piano minuets arranged for quartet by Snyder. Before launching into them, Snyder announced that their debut CD will be out in the fall, on either the MSR label or the British label Orchid (between which they were deciding.) It will have a Haydn quartet, the Ravel quartet they nailed at the Masonic Temple show (another piece I know well enough to vouch for), and the transcribed Ravel minuets. There might be more. My memory should qualify me for disability.

Lanky, fresh-faced and affably serious (they look like a Division III college cross country team), the future for the Tesla Quartet would seem to be a very bright one, barring disaster. I defintiely recommend checking them out: they have two upcoming shows in the region – one in Hickory on March 31 and the other in Hendersonville on April 8. In each case they’ll be playing a piece that resulted from an annual online “Call for Scores” the quartet presents on its website. (The winning piece, by an Ozark composer, uses a field recording made in Asheville, which could be cool. Could be not.)

By all means, visit their site – teslaquartet.com – for news, shows and release date; and check out some of the numerous HD videos on Youtube.

The Hugo Kauder Society, meanwhile, is a living and breathing thing, sponsoring an annual chamber music competition (which the Euclid Quartet won, incidentally) among other things, and has a website up and running, hugokauder.org. The director’s name is Karl Warner; his e-mail is karl@hugokauder.org.

Finally, in doing a read-over, I noticed the one Tesla member whose name is not mentioned above is the violist’s Edwin Kaplan. To leave it out would be an injustice. They are an awesome foursome.