Symphonic cinema
Orchestras draw new fans by pairing live scores, classic films
David Newman leads the S.F. Symphony through Leonard Bernstein’s score to “On the Waterfront” last Saturday as the film plays.
Jim Cullison and Alexis Ercoli are no strangers to Davies Symphony Hall. The San Mateo couple drives up several times a year to hear the San Francisco Symphony play music of Beethoven, or Gershwin, or what-have-you.
But last Saturday night, Cullison in particular was more excited than usual at the prospect of hearing the orchestra in action. That’s because it was movie night at Davies, and this longtime film buff was about to see the 1954 masterpiece “On the Waterfront,” with Leonard Bernstein’s Oscar-nominated score performed live.
“‘On the Waterfront’ is one of my favorite movies of all time,” he said, “and to have the chance to see one of the classics of the
with live music — well, it’s truly magical.”
Cullison is far from alone in this enthusiasm, and the San Francisco Symphony is not the only orchestra making a quick move to capitalize on that interest. Across the U.S., symphony orchestras have suddenly begun adding movie nights to their programming rosters, screening popular classics and blockbuster hits while the orchestra performs a score that used to be channeled through a tinny sound system.
Last fall, the New York Philharmonic devoted a Big Apple-centric week to screenings of “West Side Story” and “Manhattan.” The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s three-part “CSO at the Movies” series opened over the Thanksgiving weekend, with the orchestra dedicating itself to John Williams’ score for “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.”
And in Hollywood’s backyard, the Los Angeles Philharmonic — which has been providing live accompaniment for movies since the mid-1990s, longer than anyone — served up a November triple-header with back-to-back presentations of “Casablanca,” “On the Waterfront” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
“Clearly, film-with-orchestra has gone from an occasional novelty to a more frequent and more vital part of the concertgoing experience,” says Brian Grohl, the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s program manager for pops.
The allure of this programming from an orchestra’s perspective is easy to see. In their neverending quest to bring in new audiences — particularly patrons for whom the standard classical repertoire is less familiar terrain than it was to their parents and grandparents — the San Francisco Symphony and similar organizations have found a product that exerts a different sort of allure from that of a Brahms or Mahler symphony.
“This is a great way in for an average audience member who might feel intimidated about coming to hear a symphony orchestra on a regular basis,” says Associate Director of Artistic Planning Richard Lonsdorf, who curates the Symphony’s film series.
Still, the sudden popularity of orchestral movie nights seems to have taken everyone involved a little by surprise. Steven Linder, a former administrator with the Los Angeles Philharmonic who now programs film-and-movie offerings through the company Film Concerts Live, recalled his first project, in 2013.
“We had put together a print of ‘Home Alone,’ with the wonderful John Williams score. John was very supportive, but when we called around to orchestras to see who was interested, only the Cleveland Orchestra said yes.
“And that production was an unmitigated success — they sold out the hall.”
Similarly with the San Francisco Symphony series, which began the same year.
“When we started, I was skeptical that there was really enough material to sustain a project like this,” Lonsdorf says. “But this whole thing has exploded. There are endless numbers of classic films we’d love to do; there are Disney films; there are all the Danny Elfman scores.”
As the Symphony’s film series goes forward — the season’s remaining offerings are “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (April 14-15) and “Casablanca” ( June 2-3) — Lonsdorf, like his fellow programmers, continues to look for ways to raise the profile of film scores, and to bring in audiences eager to hear them in live performance. But he’s also cautious about letting the popular success of these programs overwhelm the Symphoscreen ny’s other musical projects.
“We’ve been trying to hold the line at six or eight film presentations a year,” he says, “because there’s not an endless supply, and we do risk fatiguing the audience.”
So far, the audience doesn’t appear fatigued. Financial rewards of film programming have been surprisingly robust, says S.F. Symphony Chief Marketing Director Russell Kelban. The orchestra’s four-program subscription series typically sells at more than 90 percent of capacity.
It’s a younger demographic as well, Kelban says, with more than twice as many attendees under 35 than come to a classical concert. And the Symphony is doing whatever it can to convert those movie buffs into regular concertgoers.
“Some of these movies, like ‘The Godfather’ or ‘2001,’ attract an older demo, but something like ‘Fantasia’ or ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is a great entry point for families. A lot of parents use these film concerts as exposure for their kids to see an orchestra live.”
But making sure the experience sticks, programmers insist, requires a good deal of curatorial savvy.
“We have specific criteria we try to follow in picking which projects to pursue,” says Edward Yim, vice president of artistic planning for the New York Philharmonic. “Obviously it needs to be a great movie, but it also needs to have a great orchestral score that uses the size and sound of the Philharmonic in a distinctive way.”
In particular, he says, he has a predilection for films like “2001” or “Fantasia” that draw on the classical core repertoire.
“When people go to ‘2001’ and hear ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ or the ‘Blue Danube’ waltz or the music of György Ligeti, that’s very heartening. Then we have a chance of converting them — ‘Now you know what the New York Philharmonic is like, so please come back and experience it in a different way.’ ”
An unscientific survey of Saturday’s audience in Davies suggested a range of motivations for attending. Some patrons were attracted by the film itself, director Elia Kazan’s gripping moral fable of mob and union corruption on the New York docks, featuring timeless performances by Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Rod Steiger and a young and arresting Eva Marie Saint.
Other attendees — like Guilherme Schwartsmann, a 26-year-old Stanford law student from Brazil — had come for a chance to hear Bernstein’s music in its original form, after knowing it only from the concert suite.
And still others were fascinated by the logistical challenges of a conductor and full orchestra matching their efforts to the lockstep pacing of a movie. Simon Turner and Logan Masterson of San Carlos, 15-year-old school chums and budding musicians, have taken a growing interest in the spectacle of live film accompaniment, coming to Davies for several screenings.
Matching live music to film has become easier with advances in technology, and the opportunities for live performance have grown out of new practices for recording soundtracks in the first place.
David Newman, the conductor and composer who led the weekend’s performances of “On the Waterfront,” has had a close-up view of that evolution. In addition to his 25-year career scoring more than 100 movies, he comes from a family full of renowned film composers, including his father, Alfred, his uncles Lionel and Emil, his siblings Thomas and Maria, and his cousin Randy.
“Traditionally, scoring used to be done with a sweep hand clock, and you’d have timings marked in the score for specific moments. But then you’re conducting while you stare at a clock.
“So my father developed what’s called the Newman System, where you mark up the movie itself with moving bars and dots that you can synchronize with.”
That constellation of indicators, evocatively dubbed “punches” and “streamers,” is still standard, but digital technology has made it easier to use. While conducting the “Waterfront” music, Newman had both an orchestral score and a video monitor on his podium; the monitor — easily visible from the audience — displayed a marked-up version of the same visual stream that was on the big screen.
The result was to lend the film a heightened immediacy that not even the most state-of-the-art home theater system could have emulated. The famous French horn solo that floats like a disembodied spirit over the opening credits sounded newly weighty as delivered by principal hornist Robert Ward. The ferocious timpani outbursts imbued the scenes of dockside violence with fresh force, and the delicate woodwind textures that underscore the tender scenes between Brando and Saint sounded fresh and intimate.
“The best film music has to be very simple on the surface, but underneath it’s always working to serve the story in harmonic, rhythmic and referential ways,” Newman says. “And in that way, it’s just like most symphonic music.
“People study the work of Brahms or Beethoven, and they ask, ‘What’s going on here? What’s the story behind it?’ Our brains are always trying to make stories out of what we hear.”