It’s over. The ‘Sound of Cinema‘ season finshed last week. Most of the music has expired but there’s a ton of stuff that’s still available:
1. These really gripping Sound of Cinema downloads from Neil Brand (learn things, like just how badly Visconti carved up Mahler’s Adagietto for Death in Venice).
2. This glorious film of a concert from the BBC Concert Orchestra and the BBC Singers (includes the spooky choral music from 2001).
3. This feature about Charlie Chaplin as composer from Matthew Sweet (did you know Chaplin was a music publisher before he got into the movies?).
4. This jazz improv response to a 1905 silent film called ‘A Trip to the Stars’ from Jazz on 3 (twitchy, kooky, really engrossing).
5. This set of four conversations with film directors and composers from Tom Service (Baz Luhrmann and Craig Armstrong about as different as you can get from Ken Loach and George Fenton).
6. These lovely photos of film music greats (Neil came into the office and searched the archive himself).
7. The man himself, John Williams, talking to Donald Macleod for his Composer of the Week (which you can also download here).
I, as much as any other reviewer here, love Neil Young and loved the Jarmusch picture it comes from, but an entire album? Its great, musically, until the poetry read by Johnny Depp, and stulifying scenes inexplicably lifted wholesale from the film (did we really need an aural rehash of Iggy Pop and Billy Bob Thornton’s scene??). Young’s haunted, dusky main theme completed the movie in a way no other artist could have..the soundtrack just could’ve used some more of the intellectual eroticism the movie had. Main theme-5 stars.