Hollywood conductors let hair down

Dallas’ music series offers a forum to film music makers

By JON BURLINGAME

The Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s recent announcement of a two-year project celebrating modern film music and its composers ­— including the commissioning of six new orchestral works — represents the latest sign of a thaw in the once chilly relationship between Hollywood and America’s concert halls.

Film composers are increasingly being commissioned to write original, nonfilm works, but this is believed to be the first time an American orchestra has asked several them to contribute to the classical repertoire as part of a single initiative.

Dallas’ “Masters of Film Music” program will span the orchestra’s 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons and feature individual concerts of the music of James Newton Howard, George Fenton, Harry Gregson-Williams, Michael Giacchino and Theodore Shapiro, as well as an “all-time great music of film” evening featuring a new work by actor-composer Anthony Hopkins.

“The thought was, wouldn’t it be great not only to commission and premiere new works from the top living film composers, but also to celebrate their careers with pieces from many of the films that they’ve done in a multimedia experience,” says Stephen Cook, chief marketing and entertainment officer for the DSO. “From an audience point of view, we think it’s going to attract a lot of new people.”

The nonfilm pieces are all expected to be 20-30 minutes in length. Cook says the composers have been given only one directive to fill the blank canvas: “Challenge the orchestra.”

That blank canvas is an attractive carrot for many composers who routinely are typed as “film composers.” Some, such as Elliot Goldenthal, have been able to escape pigeonholing by working regularly in other venues, such as the New York theater. Others, like John Williams and Bruce Broughton, have been writing concert music for decades but without the kind of fanfare that often accompanies their movie work.

Still others, e.g. Philip Glass and John Corigliano, write primarily for the concert hall but do movies occasionally.

Says Thomas Newman (“American Beauty”), whose new work for the Kronos Quartet will debut Nov. 21 as part of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s West Coast, Left Coast Festival: “We all now, as creative people, reach anywhere we can for the opportunity to be expressive. (Writing for the concert hall) is a much different type of experience, richer in many ways.”

Concert-hall programmers, until fairly recently, tended to ignore the contributions of composers to movies (unless they were by already accepted “names” like Aaron Copland, Sergei Prokofiev or William Walton).

“Everybody was compartmentalized in that antiquated mindset, that film composers could only compose for films,” says Lee Holdridge, the Emmy-winning composer who lately has been working on opera commissions. “That academic mafia used to try to rule the concert hall and the opera world, (determining) who was acceptable.”

But now, Holdridge says, “It’s the 21st century — a whole new ballgame.”

Aging, declining audiences at symphony halls nationwide may be contributing to this line of thinking. Dallas, which has premiered dozens of film suites including “Titanic” and “The English Patient,” has seen growth in its subscriber base for the past two seasons.

And earlier this year, Howard’s orchestral work “I Would Plant a Tree” debuted with the Pacific Symphony in Orange County, Calif. Last year, Howard Shore’s opera “The Fly” premiered in Paris and L.A. Prior to that, David Newman’s “Concerto for Winds” and Elfman’s “Serenada Schizophrana” received splashy premieres on both coasts.

Shapiro, one of the six to be spotlighted in Dallas, emerged from the concert ranks a few years ago but has focused on movies, mostly such comedies as “Tropic Thunder” and “The Devil Wears Prada.” He thinks the Dallas concert will allow him “to showcase some of the really great music that has been written for comedies but has probably not been examined as music.”

Giacchino, whose origins as a videogame composer would have gotten him shunned a decade ago — but whose music accompanies two of the year’s top-five box office grossers (“Up,” “Star Trek”) — says he loves “the idea of mixing film music with the art of pure orchestral writing. I think it’s exciting that the concert world is beginning to embrace film music as a kind of new orchestral art. Combine that with the inclusion of new works written by working film composers and it’s exactly the kind of thing I would have loved to attend as a kid — or even now, for that matter.”