Camerata:
Switching from servant to master, sometimes well
March 31, 2008When writing music for the concert hall, the composer is lord and master. When scoring a film, the composer is servant, of necessity fitting the music to creative decisions already made by the director, the cinematographer, the editor. One can't say that either role is more difficult than the other (though the servant role is more lucrative); they suit different temperaments. Few composers operate equally well in both modes.
Camerata San Antonio on March 30 offered concert works by three composers best known for their film scores -- Nino Rota, Bernard Herrmann and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Some of the results were surprising.
Herrmann's film music was frequently nervous, prickly, propulsive, wracked by stabbing dissonances (Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho," "Vertigo" and "The Wrong Man," among others). His "Souvenirs de Voyage" for clarinet and string quartet was all lovely, calm, gently shimmering surfaces, somewhat derivative of Ravel. The three contrasting movements were, in turn, sedative, soporific and somnolent, and all three were generous in their dormative powers. In waking moments I noticed that the performance was very beautiful. The players were clarinetist Ilya Shterenberg, violinists Ertan Torgul and Karen Stiles, violist Emily Watkins Freudigman and cellist Kenneth Freudigman.
Korngold had made a name for himself in Europe with an opulently scored opera, "Die tote Stadt," before coming to Hollywood and inventing the swashbuckler movie-music genre. His Piano Quintet in E, first performed in 1923, is in the ripe Romantic chromatic style of the period, but it also exhibits many of the traits that made Korngold an ideal film composer. The middle slow movement is like a dream sequence. The mercurial finale is full of incident, color and wit. Joining the local string players, guest pianist Aileen Chanco, who flew in from California, made a strong impression with her clear, stylish and authoritative playing.
Rota created iconic film scores in unseemly profusion -- "The Godfather," Franco Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" and numerous Fellini films, including "La strada" and "La dolce vita." In his Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano, Rota navigated freely and expertly around a bright, citrusy harmonic palette and wove delicious interplay among voices. The elegiac middle movement unleashed gorgeous playing from Shterenberg and Kenneth Freudigman. The finale intriguingly bounced between rhapsody and burlesque. This is a piece that deserves to be heard more often. On a scale of 1 to 10, it's at least a strong, um, 8½.
Mike Greenberg
