Ravinia 2019, Issue 5, Week 9

5DYiniD first SresenteG D fiOm Zith OiYe orchestrDO DccomSDniment in 1 1, when Alexander Nevsky was shown in the Pavilion. A second screen was positioned at the back of the venue for the Lawn audience, but to show it there, the reeO to reeO fiOm SroMector hoXseG in D rentDO trXcN hDG to be positioned in the middle of the audience. Movie music has been part of sym- phonic pops concerts at least since the s, but Henry Mancini, the famed composer of scores for such movies as e Pink Panther and Breakfast at Ti any’s, took things even further beginning around the s, when he led more than performances of his most popular themes each year across the United States and beyond. But David Newman, who returns to conduct On the Waterfront a er leading West Side Story , points to John Williams as the biggest catalyst in changing attitudes in the classical world about lm music. Not only did Williams’s high-qual- ity scores for lms like Lincoln and the blockbuster franchises Star Wars , Indiana Jones , and Harry Potter earn the respect of symphonic musicians, he won them over through the sheer force of his personality and love for the form. He has championed his music and that of other cinematic composers both as principal conductor of the Boston Pops from to and through his guest engagements with myriad other orchestras. “ at was at a time when or- chestras just hated playing lm music,” Newman says of the conductor’s tenure in Boston. “ ey would almost revolt if you programmed lm music.” One of the most important antecedents of today’s concert screenings took place in with a nation- wide tour of Abel Gance’s silent lm Napoléon , with its use of three projectors side-by-side in the nale for a ground- breaking widescreen e ect. Famed director Francis Ford Coppola commissioned his father, Carmine, to create a score for a reconstructed version of the lm, which ran some four hours. It opened at Radio City Music Hall and toured to cities across the United States, with the composer conducting an accompanying orchestra of about players. It was so popular during its stop at the Chicago eatre that a second weekend of screenings had to be added. “It was very cool, and a lot of people [took notice],” says Peter M. Bernstein, another veteran lm compos- er and conductor. Accelerating the proliferation of these cinematic o erings has been rapid changes in technology. Just the shi from lm to digital projectors has made it much easier to rehearse these programs, because orchestras can much more quickly roll back a movie to hone a particular musical passage in the score. Technology has also helped prepare lms for concert treatment, clearing away the recorded music on the soundtrack and leaving the just the dialogue and special e ects. Newer lms, such as ’s Coco , have separate audio tracks already, allow- ing them to enter the repertory quickly, but for older productions, it was a painstaking process that has got- ten easier with the in- troduction of special computer programs that draw on arti - cial intelligence. In the case of West Side Story , which Newman premiered with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in , technicians used a then-new process developed by Paris-based Audionamix to undertake the tricky separation of the singing from the instrumental music. Technology remains less useful, though, in reassembling the scores necessary to play the music for these movies. In some cases, the original scores were destroyed by the studios and transcriptions have to be made from the recorded soundtracks. But more o en, Newman says, researchers embark on what are called “treasure hunts” in the eld, scouring archives for anything that might be useful. For West Side Story , he says, a “short score” (or condensed orchestral score) from the original lm recording still existed, and from that a workable concert score was carefully reconstructed. In the case of Ghostbusters , the orig- inal score is di erent from the music that is heard on the soundtrack, because songs were added and other changes were made as the movie was edited. Bernstein, who conducted Ravinia’s screening, had to piece together a score that matches the lm, entirely reorches- trating it with a smaller instrumentation RAVINIA FILE PHOTOS 32 RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 29 – AUGUST 11, 2019