MUSIC REVIEW : Composers Conduct ‘A Night of Movie Music’

Any program that starts with a series of those 10-second fanfares written for the company logos flashed at the start of a movie can’t be taking itself too seriously.

Nevertheless, apart from the celebrity glamour and self-congratulatory speechifying, the “Night of Great Movie Music” on Tuesday at Royce Hall, UCLA, did have several weighty purposes. One was to raise money for a film-music preservation program at Sundance Institute, a film school and production facility headed by Robert Redford and based in Utah.

Another was to make the case that movie music deserves to be considered as serious concert music. In this effort, it did not succeed.

It would be hard to imagine a more sympathetic, supportive forum for the proposal, however. David Newman conducted with gusto, sensitivity, commitment and a natural feel for the music. Additionally, the composers on hand to conduct their own music--David Raksin, Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, Maurice Jarre and Georges Delerue--led what presumably were definitive interpretations.

The Sundance Symphony, a 90-member ad-hoc orchestra made up of local studio and free-lance musicians, played excellently, with sonorous brass, and strings that were particularly clean, lean and precise and exhibited no hint of saccharine excess.

Film clips were shown only part of the time, incidentally, perhaps to reinforce the claim that the music could stand alone.

The selections and styles ranged from a schmaltzy Viennese waltz by Erich Korngold (from “Kings Row”) to the urbane and rueful wit of Delerue (a medley of music written for films directed by Francois Truffaut), from the low-down nightclub band music of Mancini (“Touch of Evil”) to the smoldering jazz-rock (“Body Heat”) of John Barry.

One could wonder whether these were the best possible choices and whether this cut-and-paste sampling was the best way to advance the argument.

But few of the pieces escaped the fragmentary, episodic and formulaic structures mandated by visual, not musical, logic, which is why the pieces simply didn’t hold interest without the screen images.

Exceptions were Jarre’s fuguing tune for “Building the Barn” in “Witness” and Delerue’s mock-Baroque overture for “Day for Night.” Both, not incidentally, were for extended scenes that are visually free in form.