I haven’t made much reference to my fiery passion for the music of Hector Berlioz in quite some time, so I’m going to rectify that. YouTube turns out to be an interesting source for older recordings of classical music — older recordings, with mono sound that can still provoke a deep thrill, with that ability mono has to allow many details in the orchestration to shine through in a way that stereo recordings, for all their warmth and vitality, can sometimes allow to fall back into the mix. For those who only know Berlioz through the Symphonie fantastique, here is one of his other popular compositions, his thrilling concert overture Le corsaire. Sir John Barbirolli conducts the Halle Orchestra. Note how far back the orchestra sits from Barbirolli; he’s a good seven or eight feet from his concertmaster. I found that interesting.
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
Something for Thursday
One of the better-known bits of 1980s pop-culture trivia is that Tom Selleck was originally slated to have played Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but was unable to get free of his contract to CBS and Magnum, PI. So Harrison Ford got the role and used it to break free of any potential Star Wars typecasting, and Selleck saw his own movie-star career pretty much end. Selleck would do movies, but he would never be the big movie star. I doubt he minds this all that much; Selleck has enjoyed a long and admirable career shuttling between movies and teevee.
However, he did get a consolation prize a few years after Raiders, in the form of a movie called High Road to China. Selleck is a drunken ex-World War I flying ace who is hired by Bess Armstrong to fly her to China, in search of her father, who has disappeared. (This has something to do with an inheritance or some such — it’s been well over fifteen years since I saw the movie.) Various adventures ensue as they fly in a pair of biplanes (Selleck has a buddy who tags along) from Cairo to China. As movies go, High Road to China is a nice work; not great but not awful either. Aside from its leads, its most notable features are the gorgeous cinematography and the lush romantic score by John Barry, which gives us this love theme.
Share This Post
Something for Thursday
Here’s a bit of wonderfully beautiful film music writing, from the movie Medicine Man, by Jerry Goldsmith. This is one of those movies to which Goldsmith gave a pretty good score despite the fact that the movie is complete crap. (The flick has Sean Connery and Lorraine Bracco as two biologists in the Amazon, trying to track down a lead on a potential cure for cancer before those pesky myopic Brazilians bulldoze the entire forest. Connery can’t quite figure out for the life of him what he’s actually looking for, even though the movie has telegraphed it to the viewers so strongly that we’re sitting there, shouting at the screen, “It’s the ****, dummy!”. (I redacted it in case you want to watch the movie, which I don’t recommend.)
Anyway, there is one wonderful scene in the movie: a sequence where the characters climb into a set of Rube Goldberg-esque chair things suspended a hundred feet above the ground and pull themselves on ropes from one tree to the next. This cue, called simply “The Trees”, underscores that scene, which is mainly good because the characters stop talking. It starts out nicely enough, but the gorgeous melody blooms forth at about the one minute mark. The track ends with some boilerplate suspense stuff once the beautiful scene has ended, but the middle four minutes are pure film music magic.
Here’s “The Trees”. (Don’t bother watching the video, it’s just a picture.)
Share This Post
Something for Thursday
One of my favorite albums from the 1980s is Genesis’s Invisible Touch. I think a lot of people probably think of this album, if they think of it at all, as basic 80s pop, but I was strongly attracted to it because it’s really a fairly gritty and depressing album. The two “up-tempo” songs, the title track and “Anything She Does”, are peppy enough, but that’s about all the pep that you’ll find on this record. “Anything…” is about pin-up girls and their static, unattainable nature (“Fiction/That’s all you really are I know…”), while “Invisible Touch” describes an infatuation with a woman only seen from afar (“Well I don’t really know her / I only know her name. / And though she will mess up your life / you want her just the same”).
After that, the album’s themes get more serious. “Land of Confusion” is a cautionary song about life in the nuclear age, with that famous video using puppets to perform satire on the geopolitics of the time. The album’s two ballads, “Throwin’ it All Away” and “In Too Deep”, are both about failed love affairs, one from the point of view of the person ending the affair and the other from the POV of the person being left. Both are beautiful songs, but both are quite sad. The first asks “Now who will light up the darkness / and who will hold your hand? / Who will find you the answers / when you don’t understand?”, while the second has Phil Collins meditating thusly: “I gave you too many reasons, being alone, when I didnt want to. / I thought youd always be there, I almost believed you, / All this time, I still remember everything you said, oh / Theres so much you promised, how could I ever forget.”
One of my favorite rock songs of all time is “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight”, which to my ears describes the harrowing night of a strung-out drug addict (“I got some money in my pocket / about ready to burn, / I don’t remember where I got it / I gotta get it to you.”). This song is sometimes heard in a shortened version, but it just doesn’t sound right to me outside its eight-minute length with the long instrumental interlude in the middle. And then there’s the two-part, eleven-minute “Domino”, all of eleven minutes long. I have no idea what “Domino” is about — maybe nuclear annihilation? It’s a very strange song, but deeply compelling, as well, with some of the album’s finest imagery in its lyrics: “Sheets of double glazing help to keep outside the night, / Only foreign city sirens can cut through, / Nylon sheets and blankets help to minimize the cold. / But they cant keep out the chilling sounds.”
Rounding it all out is a vocal-less techno track, “The Brazilian”, that was actually used in a gritty episode of Magnum, PI. For all the pop sound on the Invisible Touch album, the songs themselves are not pure pop at all. There’s a lot going on underneath the surface of this record.
Anyway, here’s one of those two ballads, “In Too Deep”.
I remember how a lot of the kids I hung out with in high school and college had specific pop or rock albums that they listened to on their Walkmen at night, with all the lights out. Invisible Touch was mine.
Share This Post
Something for Thursday
Film composer Maurice Jarre died earlier this week, so it is fitting that I devote this week’s Something for Thursday to him. I didn’t like the movie, but the score is beautiful. Here, from Dead Poets Society, is “Keating’s Triumph”.
Thanks for the music, Maestro Jarre.
Share This Post
Something for Thursday
I tend to select more introspective, meditating, or downright sad pieces of music for this weekly feature, so here’s something upbeat. Longtime readers know that one of my favorite film composers working today is Joe Hisaishi, a guy whose work is unknown to most filmgoers because he works in Japanese cinema and anime exclusively. However, if you have seen anything by my beloved Hayao Miyazaki, you’ve heard Hisaishi’s music. Sometimes filmmakers find themselves using certain composers on an almost exclusive basis, forming partnerships that result in great film music for great films. Examples include Steven Spielgerg/John Williams*, Alfred Hitchcock/Bernard Herrmann, and to a lesser extent, Robert Zemeckis/Alan Sylvestri.
Anyhow, here is a selection by Joe Hisaishi, from his score to Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. The track is titled “Procession of the Spirits”, and it is heard early in the film when night falls and all the ghostly spirit patrons begin to file into the magnificent bathhouse where strange supernatural things are afoot. In Hisaishi’s best scores he is able to combine Asian and Western musical ideas almost seamlessly, with wonderful and magical effect. Enjoy — here’s “Procession of the Spirits”. (There’s nothing to watch here; it’s just a title card accompanied by the music.)
Isn’t that great!
* Trivia question: What is the only feature film directed by Steven Spielberg whose score was not composed by John Williams?