Home » Classics of the Silver Screen: Classical Music Popularized By the Movies
Details
Some of the most innovative and interesting uses of symphonic and operatic music can be found at the movies. This concert, featuring musical classics featured in well-known film scores, demonstrates how classical music has contributed to the musical ambience of Hollywood.
Program to include:
Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, which lent its frenetic energy to Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Barber: Adagio for Strings, which imbued Platoon and The Elephant Man
Pachelbel: Canon in D Major, heard in Robert Redford's moving drama Ordinary People
And a medley of music by Puccini and more!
$69 Dress Circle (A)
$59 Terrace (B)
$51 Orchestra (C)
$38 Upper Circle (D)
$28 Gallery (E)
$20 Orchestra Front (F)
(click map for interactive version)
Tickets subject to applicable service charges.
Thank you to the generous supporters of this series: Bill & Mary Jo Robbins
Thank you to our concert sponsor: 
Thank you to our media sponsor: 
Program Information
Program
WAGNER
The Ride of the Valkyries (from Die Walküre) (Arr Hutschenruyter) (5’)*
Featured in Apocalypse Now, Rebel Without a Cause and The Blues Brothers
GRIEG
In the Hall of the Mountain King (from Peer Gynt) (3’)*
Featured in Rat Race and Scratch
MOZART
“Vedrai carino” (from Don Giovanni, K527) (Da Ponte) (3’)*
Featured in The Mozart Brothers
MOZART
“Una donna a quindici anni” (from Così fan tutte, K588) (Da Ponte) (4’)*
Featured in All the King’s Men
PACHELBEL
Canon in D major (6’)*
Featured in Ordinary People
DVOŘÁK
"Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém" (Song to the Moon) (from Rusalka) (Kvapil) (5’)*
Featured in The Departed, Bicentennial Man and Driving Miss Daisy
BARBER
Adagio for Strings (8’)*
Featured in Platoon and The Elephant Man
SIBELIUS
Finlandia (8’)*
Featured in Die Hard 2 and The Hunt for Red October
INTERMISSION
BIZET
Les Toréadors (from Carmen Suite No. 1) (3')*
Featured in Magnolia and The Bad News Bears
PUCCINI
Viva Puccini! (Arr Robert Wendel) (7’)*
Gianni Schicchi (O mio babbino caro) / La bohème (Musetta’s Waltz) / Madama Butterfly (Prelude and Un bel di vedremo) / Turandot (Nessun dorma)
Featured in Fatal Attraction (Madama Butterfly), A Room With a View (Gianni Schicchi), Moonstruck (La bohème) and The Witches of Eastwick (Turandot)
SONDHEIM
“Green Finch and Linnet Bird” (from Sweeney Todd) (Orch Jonathan Tunick) (3’)*
Featured in Sweeney Todd
DEBUSSY
Clair de lune (from Suite bergamasque) (Arr Arthur Luck) (5’)*
Featured in Ocean’s Eleven and The Right Stuff
FEIGENBAUM
Serenade for Strings (6’)*
CATALANI
“Ebben? Ne andrò lontana” (from La Wally) (Illica) (5’)*
Featured in Diva, Crimson Tide and Philadelphia
LISZT
Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2: Friska (Arr Müller-Berghaus) (5’)*
Featured in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Rhapsody Rabbit (Bugs Bunny), and A Day at the Races (Marx Brothers)
Program Notes
Don’t get us wrong – there are tons and tons of great, original movie soundtracks out there. It’s not like movie makers need to turn to established, already-written pieces of classical music to make their movies work. It’s just that sometimes, the right work, in the right context, can turn an ordinary movie moment into something extraordinary. So, with apologies to John Williams, Dmitri Tiomkin, Jerry Goldsmith, and all the other great film scorers, tonight’s concert celebrates movies made just a little better thanks to the classics.
The name Richard Wagner (1813-1883) is synonymous with the Viking-helmeted opera singers that are the very cliché of what opera is to many people. But there’s a reason it’s such a familiar image – he wrote some of opera’s greatest tunes, and perhaps the most famous is the music written to accompany The Ride of the Valkyries. Based on Norse myth, the Valkyries were warrior women who collected the honoured dead from the field of battle, to carry them to the warriors’ hall of Valhalla. In the opera Die Walküre, from which this music originates, the music is sung as well as played by orchestra. Tonight’s version is an orchestra-only arrangement by Wouter Hutschenruyter.
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) was Norway’s most famous composer, and helped bolster his country’s culture by writing music for or based on Norwegian literature and folklore. For instance, Henrik Ibsen, Grieg’s countryman, wrote a play based on the Norse folk character Peer Gynt – and Grieg wrote music to be played at performances of the drama. In the Hall of the Mountain King is from a scene in Act II, in which the lascivious Peer has taken refuge away from the people he has harmed, only to meet temptation once again in the hall of the work’s title.
Don Giovanni is an opera based on the story of Don Juan, the infamous Spanish lover. Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756-1791) wrote the music to words by Lorenzo Da Ponte, and in their telling of the tale, Don Juan refuses to repent of his misdeeds, preferring damnation to being anything other than who he is. The aria “Vedrai carino” (“Come, dear one”) is sung by Zerlina, consoling her love Masetto after Don Juan has got the best of him.
Another Mozart and Da Ponte opera is Così fan tutte (“Thus do they all”), a farce of fidelity tested and cross-dressing that is as funny as it is politically incorrect. The maidens Dorabella and Fiordiligi have their loyalty to their intendeds tested by the very intendeds themselves, while through it all, the ladies’ maid Despina – more worldly and cynical than her employers – thinks the two young women are crazy not to experience more of life, and love. The aria “Una donna a quindici anni” (“A fifteen-year-old woman”) is sung by Zerlina as she encourages Dorabella and Fiordiligi to heed the overtures of the two Albanian strangers who court them (of course, it’s their fiancées in disguise).
A “canon” is a musical form in which a melody is played over a repeated pattern (the repeated pattern is called the “ground bass”). Each repetition of the melody can vary in tempo or key, and the subsequent entries of the melody create an overlapping pattern. There is no more famous Canon that that composed by Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706). In fact, so famous is this bit of music that it has utterly and irrevocably overshadowed anything else the poor man wrote – but if we are to only know one of his tunes, by all means let it be this one.
The notion of a creature from a supernatural or fairy realm foregoing their immortality over the love of a human is familiar to many cultures. In Czech folklore, such a creature was Rusalka, a water sprite brought to life in the opera of the same name by Antonín Dvořák (1841-1904). She sings a prayer to the moon (“Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém”) near the opera’s beginning, asking it to send word of the love she has for a human prince to him. The story does not end well – this is opera, after all – but the song itself is haunting and beautiful.
The famous conductor Arturuo Toscanini was one of the first to use the new medium of radio to bring classical music to millions of American homes. A champion of young American composers, Toscanini commissioned Samuel Barber (1910-1981) to write a work for a radio broadcast by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, which Toscanini led. Barber, 28 at the time, took the slow movement from his String Quartet, Op.11, and arranged it for full string orchestra. In this setting, the Adagio for Strings has become a work performed at many solemn occasions, and is one of the most recognizable works of American classical music.
As Grieg did for Norwegian culture, so did Finnish composer Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) champion Finland’s rich store of legends and sagas. His most famous work was born of his great national pride. In 1899, the yoke of Russian repression lay heavy on the people of Finland. Many avenues of expression of Finnish patriotism were violently put down, and when several writers demonstrated the courage to speak out against Russian rule, a pageant was staged in their honour. As his country’s most famous composer, Sibelius was asked to compose the music for the pageant. Its highlight was a work originally called Finland Awakes, though it has become known to us by the shortened name Sibelius later gave it – Finlandia.
The swaggering theme of Les Toréadors from the opera Carmen by Georges Bizet (1838-1875) captures perfectly the machismo of the men who provide the spectacle of bullfighting. Too bad that Georges Bizet never lived long enough to see his opera of the gypsy girl who refuses to sacrifice her freedom for love become one of the most treasured operas in all of music. He died weeks after the opera’s premiere, at only 37 years old.
Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924) wrote some of the most popular operas still holding the stage today, and some of opera’s greatest melodies as well. Arranger Robert Wendel assembled some of the most popular into a suite called Viva Puccini!, and you’re likely to recognize most, if not all of them. The suite begins with a bit from the music which opens the opera Madama Butterfly. It is followed by the gorgeous song the loving daughter of Gianni Schicchi sings to her father (“O mio babbino caro”). From the story of the starving artists of La Bohème comes the lilting Musetta’s Waltz, followed by the plaintive and beautifully sad song Cio-Cio San, the title character of Madama Butterfly, sings as she realizes her lonely fate (“Un bel di vedremo”). The suite finishes with that most famous of arias, “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot.
We’re cheating with the two of the next three works on our program. After all, the only movie we know that used music from Stephen Sondheim’s (b. 1930) 1979 Broadway hit Sweeney Todd is – well, Sweeney Todd – the Tim Burton-directed movie of the musical. But we couldn’t pass up the chance to have Kathleen Brett sing “Green finch and linnet bird,” a song sung by the daughter of the title character but who is unaware of her true identity, as she admires the wares of a birdseller from the window of her guardian’s home.
This most famous of all Claude Debussy’s (1862-1918) works is the third movement from a four-movement suite written for solo piano called the Suite bergamasque. Clair de lune (“Moonlight”) is marked Andante très expressif in the piano score, and its haunting and memorable melody is indeed most expressive. It has been refashioned for any number of instruments, and tonight’s performance features what is probably the most famous orchestration of Clair de lune, the one done by Arthur Luck
Stephen Feigenbaum is a 20-year-old composer from Winchester, Massachusetts, whose music has found a champion in tonight’s conductor, Robert Bernhardt. Feigenbaum’s Serenade for Strings premiered in Boston in April 2008. Of his work, the composer has written: "The Serenade for Strings, while not a true serenade, borrows from the Romantic repertoire of slow string movements. When I composed it, I devoted more time to it than I've spent on most of the music I have written since then. This was probably because I felt constrained by my decision to restrict the work's language to that of the late Romantic period. As a contemporary composer, I don't think that writing music as though it were 1890 is the best solution to developing modern yet accessible work. But the exercise of writing this piece has taught me a lot about what it is that contemporary audiences find so appealing about late Romantic music.”
Like Pachelbel mentioned above, Alfredo Catalani (1854-1893) is really known today for only one work, his 1892 opera La Wally. The title character is a young girl from the Tyrolean Alps who is hopelessly in love with the son of her father’s fierce rival. The opera’s most famous moment is the impassioned aria “Ebben? Ne andrò lontana,” from the opera’s first act, in which Wally sings of her determination to forever leave her home.
We conclude tonight’s concert in an atmosphere of fun and excitement. Most of the Hungarian Rhapsodies written by Franz Liszt (1811-1886) were pastiches. The combined real Hungarian folk tunes and influences with music in a faux style written by Liszt himself. They also typically combined a slower opening section with a whirling and brisk concluding section. Tonight, we will hear the famous tunes which round off the delightful Rhapsody No. 2, in a marvelous orchestration done by Karl Müller-Berghaus.
Program Notes © 2010 by D.T. Baker
Artist Information
Robert Bernhardt is the second Music Director in the history of the combined Chattanooga Symphony & Opera, and is currently in his 16th season with the company. Concurrent with his CSO tenure, Bernhardt holds the additional title of Principal Pops Conductor of the Louisville Orchestra where he is currently in his 28th season. He began his professional career there in 1981 as Assistant Conductor, and has worked with the Orchestra every year since. He was the Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Rochester Philharmonic (1995-98), Music Director and Conductor of the Tucson Symphony (1987-95), Principal Guest Conductor of Kentucky Opera (1991-96), and Music Director of the Amarillo Symphony Orchestra (1985-1987). His vast symphonic repertoire covers most of the standard canon and his commitment to the music of our time is significant.
This season, Robert Bernhardt will make his guest conducting debut with the Houston Symphony, and returns to the podiums of the Pacific Symphony, Tucson Symphony, and the Chattanooga Ballet. He has guest conducted the Detroit, St. Louis, Seattle, Phoenix, Nashville, Colorado, Pacific and Iceland Symphony Orchestras among others, and has been a frequent guest with the Pittsburgh Symphony, the Tucson Symphony, and the Boston Pops. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1978. In addition to his work with the CSO, he has conducted the Opera Companies of Nashville and Birmingham. He has also conducted the Louisville Ballet, the North Carolina Ballet, the Jacksonville Ballet and the Lonestar Ballet. Born in Rochester, NY, Robert Bernhardt holds a Master's Degree with Honors from the University of Southern California School of Music where he studied with Daniel Lewis. He was a Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of Union (NY) College, where he was an Academic All-American Baseball Player.
Since making his ESO debut in May 2006, Robert Bernhardt has become a favourite guest conductor of both the orchestra and its audience. The 2010 Symphony Under the Sky is the fifth consecutive edition of the festival led by Mr. Bernhardt. He also conducts our annual Lightly Classical Christmas and Christmas Pops concerts in December 2010.
Kathleen Brett, sopranoCherished by audiences in North America and Europe not only for the beauty of her tone and stylistic instinct but also for her natural stage presence and dramatic skills, Canadian soprano Kathleen Brett has enjoyed a long artistic collaboration with the Canadian Opera Company portraying a variety of roles including Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, Romilda in Stephen Wadsworth’s acclaimed production of Xerxes, and the Governess in The Turn of the Screw.
Prominent among her Canadian appearances are roles L’Opéra de Montréal, Toronto’s Opera Atelier, Opera Lyra Ottawa, Calgary Opera, Vancouver Opera, and Edmonton Opera. In the U.S., Ms. Brett has sung with Arizona Opera, Utah Opera, San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera, and Lincoln Center with L’Opéra Francais de New York. She has also sung with Dallas Opera, The Boston Baroque, Opera Pacific in Costa Mesa, and Teatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro. In Europe, Ms. Brett has appeared at L’Opéra de Monte Carlo, the Royal Opera Covent Garden, and Vlaamse Opera in Antwerp and Ghent. A commensurate concert artist of great charm, Kathleen Brett is frequently found on the concert platform with many Canadian and American symphony orchestras including Toronto, Montréal, Chicago, Minnesota, Detroit, Vancouver, Cincinnati, Utah and Philadelphia. A favorite of the Boston Pops Orchestra, she was featured soloist of the Holiday Pops tour and also an all Gershwin program at Symphony Hall in Boston.
Kathleen Brett last appeared with the ESO and Robert Bernhardt at the 2009 Sobeys Symphony Under the Sky.
My ESO COMMUNITY
Search
Calendar
| |||||||||
| Su | Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 3
| 4 | ||||||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
| 11
| |||
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16
| 17 | 18
| |||
19
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24
| 25
| |||
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29
| ||||||
Click for more info.
Add comment
Tell us what you think! Comments are pre-moderated and will be published once approved.