This is part of a series.
- Here’s the last post on Moana, Inferno, etc. - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=117611
- If you want the full set of links covering the Too Big To Fail era or earlier, click on my profile.
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A Prussian Requiem (2016) - *****
John Powell; libretto by Michael Petry; Philharmonia Orchestra & Voices conducted by José Serebrier; released on
Hubris: Choral Works by John Powell with The Prize Is Still Mine and Requiem Addendum in 2018
featuring the Eric Whitacre Singers conducted by Eric Whitacre and L.A. gospel singers conducted by Edie Boddicker;
music transcriptions by Batu Sener; thank you to Gavin Greenaway & Germaine Franco
“Scores based on temps based on scores based on temps and so on. It’s like a snake sucking its own cock. I tell younger composers, ‘don’t listen to film music’. Listen to the sources. Britten, Holst, Copland. You hear everything you need to know about scoring. And it’s better; it had to support its own nonverbal storytelling language. If I put anything I wrote against Vaughan Williams, it doesn’t have the same power. [But] there’s something about striving to be [as good as] what is 200 years later still giving transcendent joy.”
Concert compositions by film composers are relatively rare. Some of that is a function of opportunity; film scores, and by extension film score composers, tend to be looked down on by the classical music establishment, though in my opinion the reasons for this have always been a bit silly and snobbish (it’s not like classical music hasn’t been driven by commercial imperatives for centuries, for example). The most prominent concert compositions by composers who also wrote for film tend to come for those who are better-known for classical music, such as William Walton, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Philip Glass. Some composers in the Golden and Silver Ages of Hollywood bounced between both mediums, though their concert works were often secondary to movies (Miklós Rózsa’s contractually-mandated summer breaks from film work, for example) and their standalone exploits usually weren’t respected in their time, like Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s violin concerto being greeted with a review saying it was “more corn than gold.”
John Williams’ concert compositions were not always warmly received by the Boston Pops when he led them, including an infamous hissing episode that led to the composer’s temporary resignation from the group in 1984. Bernard Herrmann’s Wuthering Heights opera wasn’t performed in his lifetime. None of Michael Kamen’s ballets have been commercially recorded. I could go on. Admittedly there have been recent successes - violin concertos by Danny Elfman and James Newton Howard, a percussion concerto by Elfman, a symphony by Cliff Eidelman - but not enough to offset longstanding biases.
An even more rare subspecies is when film composers take a stab at writing oratorios, a work where an orchestra is accompanied by narrative voices, usually with a religious bent. The sole significant one for a long time was Joshua by Franz Waxman, an impressive but austere work which got solid reviews in 1959 but largely faded from memory and is still probably an obscurity even with Deutsche Grammophon releasing an excellent new recording decades later. Elliot Goldenthal wrote an oratorio in 1993 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. And there’s an oratorio for Sergei Prokofiev’s music from the Soviet-era Ivan the Terrible films; sure, that material was only structured that way by others long after Prokofiev had passed away, but it does make for a fun way to hear the work live with someone in the narrator role (you have not lived until you’ve heard Gérard Depardieu yell at you in Russian).
So it was understandable if some found it amusing when John Powell spent a few years telling people that not only was he eventually going to take time off to write a piece of concert music but that it was specifically going to be an oratorio. “Yeah, ok, whatever you say buddy.” Powell “realized I had to shit or get off the pot,” and in 2014 he finally decided to give it a go, along with helping his son build a trebuchet for a school project. But even though he had treated some recent film scores as opportunities to test his chops for this (admitting “I wrote quite heavily for choir [on How To Train Your Dragon 2] as an experiment”, and possibly doing the same for some of the operatic solos in Happy Feet 2), he seemed to recognize that years of using visual inspiration for composing may have created some habits that were hard to break.
So he started with a warm-up exercise by reworking music he wrote with his friend Gavin Greenaway years earlier. “We did a retrospective of Michael [Petry’s] work in the Museum of Modern Art in Palm Springs. Gavin wrote for a Russian chorus; I wrote for a Gospel [choir of] women. I am an atheist, but I love Gospel music. It touches my soul the way I am sure it touches anyone’s soul who believes in God.” Many score fans had loved the brief forays into Gospel in earlier Powell scores, including the ending to Gigli, so for them the fourteen-minute fusion of orchestra, vocal soloist, and choir called The Prize Is Still Mine was a treat when it came out on album a few years later, especially with the voices (conducted by Powell’s longtime vocal collaborator Edie Boddicker) joined by the composer’s exultant brass writing late in the piece in something not dissimilar to the more resolute portions of his film work. Score fans might also notice similarities in the early minutes of the piece with John Williams’ dramatic writing at its most stark, or perhaps it might be more appropriate to call it Powell channeling Williams when he’s channeling Ralph Vaughan Williams. “It uses a style of music that’s so English that some of it is like Holst [or] Gospel music by Vaughan Williams.”
With that piece done, Powell felt ready to concentrate on the oratorio full-time, albeit with that aforementioned 5-week interruption to write the replacement score for Pan.
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For a work about war, Powell’s oratorio is rather short on brutality and nastiness; there is none of the horror of Goldenthal’s aforementioned oratorio, nor the chaos of Shostakovich’s seventh symphony. But Powell wasn’t aiming for that; when choosing to write a piece about the eve of World War I (and in particular the efforts of a German general to convince Kaiser Wilhelm to enter the conflict), he was more interested in treating the event as an ironic tragedy. “It’s impossible to defend World War II from a pacifistic perspective. It was too late. So why did the first World War start? There [were] economic reasons, various forces trying to get more and more land. I liked the idea that it wasn’t the violent act of assassination, it was an act of willful childishness.” Powell also felt how he wrote the piece was impacted by his years in Hollywood, and probably for the better. “The tsar, the kaiser, and the king were all cousins [and] all idiotic brats, and it just took one more idiotic brat to stab their feet. That would never have occurred to me had I not worked with so many good filmmakers, the idea of the small moment being the meaning of everything. I didn’t realize how much [that] affected my ability to write music. It’s not Peter and the Wolf, [but] having a dramatic throughline made sense for how to construct the music.”
Introduction to Moltke is idyllic and blissful, as is the following March which juxtaposes rapid-fire horn and percussion activity with exultant mixed choir. Beware the Bear is a marvelous showcase for the powerful voice of tenor Javier Camarena (playing the aforementioned general) who’s backed by some pranksterish chime sounds here. The irony of the piece now starts to become apparent. We, The Glorious Dead introduces some mild dissonance as the depth of the male choir starts to make itself known before alternating with elegant female voices dancing through grim words, while the mix of churning strings, mixed choir, and Camarena’s surging voice in Easy mask how the lyrics are almost constantly about death. At this point, seasoned Powell listeners may draw intriguing connections between this and the carcass-obsessed lyrics in the composer’s cheerful bastardization of Food, Glorious Food for Ice Age: The Meltdown.
The hyperactive woodwinds in The Papers of Peace flow into a vocal argument between soloists in Let the Rails Roll (thus introducing Steven Pence, the baritone playing Kaiser Wilhelm) before giving way to the relentless drumbeat of Victory is Ours and its volleys of voices and orchestra that inject religious overtones and hints of nationalistic fervor. My Reasoning pivots back to Camarena’s voice before the instrumentalists unleash some wild ricochets of brass and snare that are the closest the piece comes to Powell’s film works (and in particular his action material). The Gift brings back the English church music feel, practically summoning the spirits of Vaughan Williams and Walton for a few minutes before pivoting to a wordless call-and-response lament as the general’s unbridled optimism gives way to the haunting horrors of the battlefield. It is here in the final minutes of the piece that one can truly understand how How To Train Your Dragon 2 was very much a warm-up act for this piece, with both works being exemplary examples of orchestral and choral representations of sadness at an epic scale.
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Powell originally expected the piece to debut at Westminster Cathedral, but the words were deemed to be not religious enough for that place, so instead it premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in March 2016. Sadly, the work would take on a devastating dimension shortly after its premiere. In addition to not finding composing for live action films much fun anymore and his aversion to glorifying violence on screen, there was a third reason Powell had been taking less film work: the declining health of his wife Melinda Lerner. Powell would end up missing the premiere to be at her bedside in Los Angeles, and she would pass away around the time of the performance. The title of the eventual album release, Hubris, was Powell’s way of entwining the hubris of those who thought the war would be over by Christmas with his hubris in trying to write the piece in the first place and his misplaced “confidence in perfect outcomes” about Melinda getting better. It is entirely possible that the tragedy was why Powell had such a limited role on Jason Bourne later that year.
Powell would later compose a seven-minute piece he called a Requiem Addendum, ostensibly to fulfill a request from famed choral composer/conductor Eric Whitacre to write something for one of his concerts but also as a means of ”commentary on the experience and my feelings on the bizarre nature of doing that, a poem to finish what was a difficult period of my life.” Despite its name, the addendum is fairly different from Prussian Requiem; the piece is entirely choral and leans far more in a liturgical direction than Powell’s earlier piece, and the mood is contemplative and even serene. It’s a short piece, but one that hits on the complexity of mourning and moving on quite well. Musical expressions of grief have rarely been so transfixing, and one can’t help but wonder if this style of music might’ve been the path Powell went down if he hadn’t started composing for films nearly two decades earlier.
Hans Zimmer Live (2016) - ****½
Musicians including Zimmer, Mike Einziger, Tina Guo, Richard Harvey, Andrew Kawcynski,
Johnny Marr, Steve Mazzaro, Lebo M, Satnam Ramgotra, Czarina Russell, Ann Marie Simpson,
Nathan Stornetta & Mel Wesson; music director Nick Glennie-Smith; Cynthia Park as Zimmer’s PA;
released as Hans Zimmer: Live in Prague in 2017
TBTF discovery #31.
The 2000 Ghent concert was covered here: https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=108077
Henry Jackman: “I'm not antisocial, but I like the role of the composer as a slightly withdrawn person no one needs to see. [But] there’s a bit of Hans that is a rock star. That's a different skill set. You need that charisma. He reached a point going, ‘I’d love to take this stuff on the road.’ They sell out all over the place, and why wouldn't they? He's got a great business infrastructure. Maybe at a certain age, I'll go, ‘Oh, I can't do another movie. What about live?’ But Hans’ status is considerably more stratospheric.”
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Despite film music often being seen as second-tier by much of the classical music establishment (again, let’s resurrect critic Mike Zwerin’s 2000 comment that “film music tends to be derivative, is by nature secondary, and ought to stay that way”), film music has now become a critical programming component for many symphony orchestras across the U.S., if not more globally. No longer is it simply a part of a summer pops concert or two, or the highlights played if John Williams comes to town. Now live performances of film music with the movie playing are a regular year–round occurrence in many major cities; my own Chicago Symphony Orchestra has been doing around 4-5 of them annually for years in its concert hall plus others outdoors at Ravinia in the summer. With symphony audiences tending to be older and some orchestras struggling to keep attendance numbers high, film music has become a necessary revenue stream, or at least a gateway drug for people to come to orchestra hall and maybe after having a good time plop down money for some Beethoven or Mahler.
Zimmer’s scores don’t lend themselves to standard film music concert formats though. A handful have been rearranged for live film performances; Gladiator in particular is quite interesting to hear when it’s actually orchestrated to take advantage of that many live performers (bye-bye unison brass). But a lot of Zimmer’s famed works are written for a hybrid of orchestra and electronics, often with the balance shifted heavily towards the latter (think back to Steve Jablonsky’s comments about how intimidated he was having to rework Driving Miss Daisy for a large concert ensemble when he was Zimmer’s assistant). Never mind all the ones written for unconventional ensembles as a result of Zimmer’s experimental attitude, jam band preferences, and/or budget constraints.
Zimmer had dealt with this challenge at the 2000 Flanders FIlm Festival, doing a concert not too far from what Mark Mancina had once mused about doing with his own music. Some works fit better with an orchestra (Journey to the Line from The Thin Red Line, for example) while others lent themselves to a rock band format, creating some awkward juxtapositions; it’s still befuddling that Nine Months of all things was on the program. Zimmer had a critical view of how it sounded (“an orchestra played through a PA system is a bad experience”), to the point that he had to be convinced to even release any of it on CD, and his subsequent statements suggested that while the concert was a nice victory lap for the successes he and his team produced over the last dozen years it was still probably a one-off.
By the middle of the 2010s Zimmer had changed his mind, with a handful of sold-out London concerts leading to a full-blown tour of Europe in summer 2016. Zimmer would cite peer pressure as the catalyst, saying Johnny Marr and Pharrell “ganged up and said you can’t hide behind a screen forever.” One could also view this as a savvy move by him and his business partners to take advantage of economic shifts in the music industry, with albums now a means to sell concerts instead of the other way around. But the most important element was that Zimmer didn’t consistently seem to be having fun. Several recent major scores of his were uninspired and/or frustrating experiences; in hindsight, the demands that Zimmer and team slavishly adhere to the temp track for On Stranger Tides may have been an inciting incident for doing the tour. In early 2016, he seemed vastly more excited about his upcoming concerts than anything having to do with Batman v Superman. He might’ve been dealing with burnout, just as former assistants Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell did in 2012. Both took sabbaticals from films (Powell took two!), with Powell writing that oratorio during his break. But can you really imagine Zimmer writing an opera as a way to detox?
The ensemble would be a mix of old and new; overlap with the Ghent crew was minimal. Longtime Zimmer pals Richard Harvey and Nick Glennie-Smith would be on hand, the former playing various specialty instruments and the latter serving as music director (and occasional accordion player). I imagine many viewers will chuckle at the sight of Harvey, the somewhat mild-mannered writer of choral works like Plague and the Moonflower, playing clarinet solos with EDM blasting in the background, at least until they learn he was in a prog rock group before he became better-known as a composer. Also on stage were instrumental contributors from a variety of Remote Control scores including guitarists Johnny Marr and Mike Eizinger, cellist Tina Guo, drummer Satnam Ramgotra, and ambient music maestro Mel Wesson. As with the Ghent concert, where then-members of Media Ventures John Powell, Gavin Greenaway, and Rupert Gregson-Williams were part of the ensemble (Third Percussionist from the Left, in Powell’s case), this ensemble would include current team members Steve Mazzaro, Andrew Kawcynski, and Nathan Stornetta.
The concert (or at least the version recorded in Prague and released in 2017) did solve some of the challenges from the 2000 Ghent performance, or rather Zimmer and team learned their lessons. It’s not that they abandoned having an orchestra or choir (they’re there, and prominently revealed at the end of the opening number), but nearly every track was arranged to take advantage of the individual performers. This produced some intriguing reimaginings of familiar works. Sure, something like 160 BPM from Angels and Demons makes tons of sense for this format largely as-is. But how about Zoosters Break Out from Madagascar as a Media Ventures clarinet concerto? Crimson Tide set to shredding guitar solos? They also fixed Rain Man which sounded too “Far Eastern” at Ghent.
There are a few areas that pale compared to Ghent. There’s nothing as thrilling as Heitor Pereira’s blazing guitar work from Mission: Impossible 2 or the epic Pete Hayock solos for Thelma and Louise. While Journey to the Line probably has to be played given its stature as one of his most famous and imitated pieces it’s a bit of a lengthy buzzkill in this kind of format, something the new rock embellishments here don’t quite solve. Not to mention that the visuals for its performance include a thin red line constantly blinking on the screen, an on-the-nose effect that is distracting and unintentionally funny. New to this concert is Interstellar, a logical inclusion as it was perhaps the last blockbuster success Zimmer oversaw before the concert, but the work’s repetitive maximalist minimalism is arguably over-extended in a lengthy arrangement that, coming almost two hours into the program, might induce slumber.
The subsequent Inception suite though? That part slayed.
There’s irony in how much enjoyment Zimmer seemed to get from playing the hits after years of saying how much he didn’t like revisiting earlier material; think him hating on his Days of Thunder material, the rumored challenges with trying to get him to approve expanded album releases of his works, and even his quote from the red carpet event for Inferno about needing to move on after each job. Now, instead of a CD that the composer had to be pushed to release, this concert came with a post-tour omnichannel album released on MP3, CD, and streaming (and later on vinyl), plus DVDs and Blu-Rays complete with slow-mo shots of Zimmer walking to the stage at the start. There are a few tracks that are probably less effective when heard as standalone audio; Driving Miss Daisy is used as a concert-opening piece where instrumentalists are gradually added to the ensemble as they walk on stage, which could confuse album listeners wondering why the dang thing keeps sounding bigger and bigger.
Maybe the concert played as a bloated and ridiculous to some, but Zimmer at this point was by far the most successful and most emulated film composer of his age, and arguably the only one who could have guaranteed butts in seats in multiple nations for a rock concert of film music - and is still doing it as of this writing, though now he has more audacious light shows. You may not have liked every score the man had supervised in 2013-16 or included in this concert, but he had certainly earned the right to party.
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Next time: The pre-pandemic years of 2017, 2018, and 2019, though I imagine there’ll be another posting hiatus since I still have another 25 or so works from that period to listen to and/or write about.
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