Ravinia 2019, Issue 5, Week 9

Playing No By Kyle MacMillan E ven though famed classical composers such as Aaron Copland and Sergei Proko ev wrote for the cinema, and lm composers like Ber- nard Herrmann created works for the symphony hall, the relationship between the two realms was long strained. Except for the occasional inclusion of movie themes on pops programs, concert programmers tended to thumb their noses at lm music as commercial and super cial. But a decade or so ago, such attitudes began to shi —and quickly. Dozens upon dozens of orchestras, from the New York Philharmonic to the Kansas City (MO) Symphony, have made movie music a regular part of their lineups. O erings range from sets of excerpts, such as Pixar in Concert , Star Trek: e Ultimate Voyage , or the “greatest hits” version of Disney’s Fantasia (which Ravinia presented in ), to complete lms both classic and contemporary, all with their scores performed live and accompanied by a screening of the lm in real time. “As this stu got [technologically] easier, and more and more orchestras dipped their toes into it and saw what kind of ravenous audience there was for [these programs], it’s just grown exponentially,” says David New- man, an Academy Award–nominated composer and conductor whose family includes top Hollywood composers Al- fred Newman (his father) and omas Newman (his brother). Ravinia rst ventured into this realm in the early s, presenting examples of classic cinema that had easy appeal to an orchestra audience. In the festival was host to the rst Chicago-ar- ea showing of a restored print of Sergei Eisenstein’s epic Alexander Nevsky , featuring a reconstruction of Proko ev’s original score for the lm—which by then had become a concert-hall staple as a shorter cantata—performed by the Ravinia Festival Orchestra with conductor Lawrence Foster. A lighter chord was struck the following year with the screening of City Lights —which had just been enshrined in the National Film Registry—with conductor Bram- well Tovey and the Ravinia Festival Orchestra performing director Charlie Chaplin’s score. Ravinia has dived more heavily into such presentations since the arrival of Welz Kau man as president and chief executive o cer, o ering two or more such lm-with-live-orchestra screenings beginning in , following the successes of showing one movie in each of the , , and seasons. “What we found is that when we put a big screen up on the [family-friendly] Lawn,” he says, “it’s an ideal way not just for parents to bring their kids to an orchestral experience but for any- body to be introduced to an orchestral experience. It’s fun and it’s musically satisfying.” For these lm presentations, the festi- val lowers a large screen over the stage of its , -seat Pavilion that is visible to patrons inside that open-air venue as well as those seated on about percent of the surrounding Lawn. It also adds another big screen facing the expansive 30 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 29 – AUGUST 11, 2019