Review: Bowl concert plays as an elegy to James Horner, and an ode to composers of movie music
One thread running through conductor Bramwell Tovey’s program with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Thursday night was how composers working in the film industry sometimes suffer from lack of recognition as “serious” composers.
Bernard Herrmann biographer Steven C. Smith called it his “demon.” Leonard Bernstein lamented that audiences would always know him for “West Side Story” rather than for more profound works, like his Symphony No. 1 “Jeremiah.” And the late James Horner’s mentor, Paul Chihara, said in a phone interview before the concert that “Jamie always wanted to become a classical composer.”
Horner, the composer whose 1998 Oscar-winning “Titanic” score and song “My Heart Will Go On” made up the bestselling soundtrack of all time, got his wish Thursday. The centerpiece for Tovey’s Hollywood Bowl concert was the U.S. premiere of “Pas de Deux,” Horner’s major new double concerto.
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Horner is also known for such scores as “Legends of the Fall,” “Braveheart,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “Avatar.” An audience member at the Bowl cited Horner’s 1992 score for the comedic caper film “Sneakers” as a favorite.
Commissioned by the young Norwegian duo of violinist Mari Samuelsen and her brother, cellist Hakon Samuelsen, who were making their Philharmonic debuts, “Pas de Deux” marks Horner’s penultimate concert work. Horner died at 61 when the small plane he was piloting in June 2015 crashed in northern Ventura County.
The Bowl concert became a celebration of the legacy of four great masters, with “Pas de Deux” joined by selections from three classic film scores: Herrmann’s “Scène d’Amour” from “Vertigo,” Bernstein’s Symphonic Suite from “On the Waterfront” and George Gershwin’s “Shall We Dance: Finale and Coda.”
All four works showed, as Tovey said by email before the concert, “the extraordinary way each composer straddled the so-called movie music/concert music divide.”
Horner doubtless would have been thrilled to see how enthusiastically the Bowl audience received “Pas de Deux,” which was given a spellbinding rendition by Tovey, the Samuelsens and the L.A. Phil. Performed live, the nearly half-hour and continuous three-movement score came off as even more moving than the Norwegian duo’s account with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic led by Vasily Petrenko on their 2015 debut disc for Mercury Classics.
Personal, lyrical and emotionally involving, “Pas de Deux” is not, as Tovey pointed out in his opening remarks, pictorial in a soundtrack-ready way. Alternately dreamy, poetic and bracing, the score was a kind of musical depiction of one of Horner’s passions. “It always seems to be flying,” Tovey told the audience. “Airborne.”
It certainly was a gorgeously rhapsodic ride. Unlike Brahms’ famous double concerto, the violin and cello in Horner’s piece don’t challenge the orchestra or, for that matter, each other in a combative dialogue. Instead, the composer ingeniously weaves their rich, glowing sonorities into the sumptuous orchestral fabric. Seeing a performance helped, because Mari and Hakon’s quiet cadenzas conveyed intimate dances, pas de deux, for the two solo instruments. Their physical movements and intensity of concentration became part of the dance.
Effective minimalist figures added touches of color in the strings and piano, and the horns conveyed an elegiac quality. At times, the score felt like an elegy to Horner himself. (Incidentally, Horner’s final concert piece, “Collage,” an ethereal concerto for four horns, is due from Mercury Classics in the fall.)
Is it any wonder why composers working in the film industry turn to the concert hall? Herrmann called composing his 1941 Symphony a “Roman holiday.”
Even Gershwin, whose “Rhapsody in Blue” is a perennial in the concert hall, had to deal with the studio staff orchestrators of his era. He discovered, as biographer Edward Jablonski noted, that even Fred Astaire had more say in the orchestration of one of his best scores, “Shall We Dance,” than Gershwin did.
Before beginning Bernstein’s powerful Symphonic Suite from “On the Waterfront,” Tovey noted it was the composer’s birthday (he would have been 98), an observation that gave his powerful account an extra poignancy. The fine solo contributions included Dan Higgins on alto sax and Denis Bouriakov on flute.
Raynor Carroll gave a brief but memorable turn on xylophone. (Carroll, who joined the L.A. Phil in 1983, is retiring as principal percussionist. His final performances with the orchestra are on Sept. 2 and 3 in “John Williams: Maestro of the Movies,” conducted by Williams and David Newman.)
The concert Thursday began with an exquisitely lovelorn rendering of Herrmann’s “Scène d’Amour” from “Vertigo,” all sighing strings.
Tovey, a first-rate Gershwin pianist, transformed the Phil into a big band for that composer’s “Shall We Dance: Finale and Coda.” He joked that people think the five saxophonists employed for the upbeat score are there “for musical reasons, but it’s just social,” eliciting a faux look of consternation from Higgins. The performance was, as Astaire might have said, swell.
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