New York Classical Review

Inventiveness in concert programming is a quality that tends to get praised in classical music. Maybe there’s some kind of thematic or extra musical hook to provide an excuse for presenting something out of the norm. 

But what it really means, as the String Orchestra of Brooklyn and artistic director Eli Spindel showed Saturday night, is that there’s some knowledge, taste, and thought behind what is being played. 

A substantial crowd came out in single-digit temperatures and slicing winds to the Church of St. Luke and St. Matthew in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, to hear SOB play film score music as music, with not a moving image in sight. 

On its face, that was a superb selection, full of both quality and surprise. Or purely musical terms, this was a rewarding evening of creative, stylish music played with care and verve, and even some guts. For one with knowledge of the craft of film scoring and some of the specific details behind some of this music, there were depths of intrigue and illumination. It was a concert that stimulated the senses and the imagination.

The night began, appropriately, with a suite from Ennio Morricone’s score for John Carpenter’s The Thing.

That Morricone was hired for this was out of the ordinary, as Carpenter makes his own superb synthesizer scores, music that is enjoyable on its own. Morricone’s name is prominent in the credits, and Carpenter specifically requested his work, but very little of his music made its way into the final cut, and that is mostly mixed down while also augmented with supplemental music Carpenter recorded.

Spindle and SOB presented what Morricone actually wrote and it was terrific. The Thing music was eerie, chilling, atmospheric. It started with the strings playing frenetic and unsynchronized pizzicati for “Contamination,” then the haunting mood piece “Wait,” which seemed to show the composer had been listing to Jerry Goldsmith’s excellent score for Alien. “Solitude” was built out of a Bartókian fugue, and the final “Despair” had an icy Shostakovich quality, tension with nowhere to go, and perfect for the characters MacReady and Childs freezing to death in Antarctica, wondering if the other was truly human.

Hearing this score was an utterly fascinating experience, like encountering a long-lost modernist masterpiece by a previously unknown artist. 

This was unfortunately not equalled by “For Petra” by Hildur Guðnadóttir from Tár—less for the quality of the music but for what it said about the course of filmmaking over the forty years between the two movies. Guðnadóttir has scored several prominent movies, and represents a drone-based style that was established by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who’s captivating work, in the Hollywood tradition, has been imitated in one film after another since his early death. “For Petra” is a sort of drone ballad that works capably within the robotic control of the movie, but as a stand-alone instrumental was the sonic equivalent of the trend in tastefully grey, expensive interior design.

How different, again, after intermission, was Toru Takemitsu’s suite, an arrangement for strings of music from three of his film scores. Perhaps the most under-appreciated 20ᵗʰ century composer, Takemitsu followed his own post-Debussy/post-Morton Feldman path. One of the impressive features of his suite is that none of it sounds like his searching, avant-garde style. He was a pro, with excellent craft, and gave the directors what they wanted. Played with real lift by the orchestra, there was the elegant, hip, tuneful lounge music for a documentary on boxer José Torres, the impressionistic mourning of the “Funeral Music” from Black Rain, and the fantastic waltz from the psychological horror move, The Face of Another. This was a delightful performance of delightful music.

Bernard Herrmann was the greatest name in 20th century film scores, and, like Morricone, was imaginative and flexible yet always with a distinctive style. Herrmann’s Fahrenheit 451 Suite, scored for François Truffaut’s 1966 version of the Ray Bradbury novel, has a cool surface despite the subject. That’s in the sound of the strings and bells, a combination of glassy and icy, but also the expression of events in this set of cues, which have the compelling quality of being above the narrative experience, looking down on the action.

In what was the best performance of the night of otherwise fine performances, one heard how film scores could be their own, separate art, music that starts with a subject that, in concert, is removed from the stage. What was left was taste and imagination.

The String Orchestra of Brooklyn plays Herrmann, Korngold, Tchaikovsky, and Berlioz, 8 p.m. May 30. thesob.org