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Gustavo Santaolalla Discusses Finch Soundtrack (The Playlist)
As you can hear in the title track, “Finch,” the score for the film is just as epic and beautiful as you’d expect from a feature helmed by Miguel Sapochnik and starring Tom Hanks about a man venturing out into the post-apocalypse with his trusty dog and his newly created robot companion.
Santaolalla is no stranger to composing incredible scores. He’s one of the rare composers to actually win back-to-back Oscars, thanks to his work in 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain” and 2006’s “Babel.”
“The possibility of composing and playing for such a wonderful film as ‘Finch’ was an immediate source of inspiration,” said Santaolalla. “The unusual combination of characters and the mix of suspense, action, humor and tenderness laid out a canvas full of possibilities – from big, powerful action scenes to intimate moments where the emotions of the story and characters take over. Working once again with David Campbell as an orchestrator allowed me to move seamlessly from large orchestra to chamber-sized pieces. In this particular moment we find ourselves living, the music for ‘Finch’ has become very special to me. Happy that finally I can share it with all of you.”
Read the full article here.
Nicholas Britell, Kris Bowers and Hildur Guðnadóttir to Play at Walt Disney Concert Hall (Variety)
For Kris Bowers, “not much can beat the feeling of being in the room when a group of musicians pours their heart into a piece of music — especially when it’s your own.”
It’s an emotion the Emmy-winning composer and jazz pianist hopes to capture with “Reel Change: The New Era of Film Music,” a concert series built alongside fellow composers Nicholas Britell and Hildur Guðnadóttir in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Taking place Nov. 19-21 at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the three individually curated programs shine a spotlight on the next generation of composers across film, television and video games.
“When you are performing for an audience, you and the audience are breathing the same air. You are experiencing exactly the same frequencies and listening to exactly the same things at the same time. So the dynamics of the shared experience of the listening creates a very special atmosphere,” says Oscar-, Emmy- and Grammy-winning Icelandic composer and cellist Guðnadóttir, whose program kicks off the series.
For his program on Nov. 20, Bowers opted for medleys of his work on “King Richard,” “Bridgerton” and “Green Book,” as well as a composition of pieces from Bowers’ musical influences, from Björk to Arcade Fire to Shigeru Umebayashi.
Seeking to tap into the emotions and themes of his projects, Bowers also worked together with his wife, Briana Henry, on a series of original film shorts, paired with new poetry by Yrsa Daley-Ward inspired by the shorts’ music and themes.
“The last live performance that I attended was at the Disney Hall, so it feels nice to be coming back to live music in this way,” says Bowers.
Read full Variety article here
Oscars 2022: Best Original Score (IndieWire)
The race for Best Original Score is marked by experimentation and invention, highlighted by the innovative frontrunner “Dune,” “The Power of the Dog,” “Spencer,” “Cyrano,” “King Richard,” “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” “Nightmare Alley,” and “Candyman.” Plus, two animated musicals — both graced by the songwriting chops of the very hot Lin-Manuel Miranda — experiment with the cultural sounds of Colombia and Cuba: Disney’s magical “Encanto” (from Germaine Franco, the studio’s first woman composer to score an animated feature), and Sony/Netflix’s “Vivo” (scored by Alex Lacamoire).
Jonny Greenwood achieves his own masterful musical invention for Jane Campion’s psychological western, “The Power of the Dog” (Netflix). Inspired by the repression and savagery of Montana rancher Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), Greenwood twists orchestral instruments into unique sounds to convey his loneliness, isolation, and yearning set against the beautiful landscape and his prison-like ranch house. A cello becomes a banjo for a unique sophistication, an atonal piano evokes pain, and French horns and strings have an aching quality. Greenwood essentially turns his score into a nightmare. (Greenwood also contends for “Spencer,” Pablo Larraín’s fable about the painful Christmas holiday of ’91 for Kristen Stewart’s Princess Diana. His score is about the colorful chaos of jazz set against the traditional orchestra that represents the Royal family. It starts with a baroque orchestra that mutates into free jazz by substituting instruments, one at a time, with the jazz performers.)….
In a season blessed by experimentation and invention, Hans Zimmer's "Dune" frontrunner goes up against Jonny Greenwood's "The Power of the Dog."
Frontrunners
“Cyrano”
“Dune”
“King Richard”
“The Power of the Dog”
“The Tragedy of Macbeth”
Rachel Portman Discusses the Julia Soundtrack (The Film Music Institute)
There’s always been a delicious zest to Rachel Portman’s way with outsized characters, a talent for hearing life as a sympathetically loopy, waltzing circus as capable of laughter as it is heartbreak. From the clowning Johnny Depp that put the English composer on the Hollywood map with 1993’s “Benny and Joon” to a gallery of aristocrats high and low born, American eccentrics from the city and trailer hoods and any number of dottily magical characters, Portman’s tell-tale melodic voice is no more joyous than when celebrating individuals who capture the public’s imagination, no more so than when mixing the ingredients to embody the larger-than-life, French-trained, Pasadena-born bon vivant Julia Child, the woman who brought nascent food porn to tastefully break America out of its jello and hotdog-bound kitchen rut into the land of anyone-can-cook-it gourmet courses.
“Emma” Oscar winner Rachel Portman whisks together a magical concoction whose ingredients are immediately recognizable at first bite.
Taste wistful strings, romping rhythms, accordion waltzes and emotion as gossamer as it can be aching, all finished on the symphonic stove with memorable themes and melody, and you’ve got the musical cooking of Rachel Portman when given the kind of boisterous character canvases she excels at. Indeed, the musician who showed that women could make a film composing mark has never more stylistically scrumptious than serving up the persona of a fellow groundbreaker in a respectively wondrous field.
Read the full article from the Film Music Institute here.