The Well-Tempered Ear

Classical music: The Oakwood Chamber Players end its season this Saturday night and Sunday afternoon by performing music by movie score composers, including Nino Rota, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bernard Hermann and Wisconsin native Ian Honeyman.

By Jacob Stockinger

Increasingly, movie scores –- at least the best and most original of them — and their composers are being recognized as a logical and legitimate extension of  or integral part of classical music, a close crossover cousin or fusion genre, if you will.

Many of the best movie scores came from classical musicians who, being Jewish, had to flee Nazi Germany. Many ended up in Hollywood, and used their musical gifts to make a living even while they privately pursued their “serious” or “art” music.

That trend of rediscovering and performing such composers and works continues locally this weekend when the Madison-based Oakwood Chamber Players (below), who are musically masterful and programatically adventuresome, will present two concerts with works by famous film composers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The concerts are on this Saturday night, May 4, 2013, at 7 p.m. at the Oakwood Village University Woods Auditorium, 6201 Mineral Point Road, and on this Sunday afternoon, May 5, at 1:30 p.m. at the UW-Arboretum Visitor Center (below).

Tickets are available at the door: $20 for general admission, $15 for seniors and $5 for students.

Visit www.oakwoodchamberplayers.com for more information.

“The Movies” concerts will explore music from a range of backgrounds — Italian, American and Austrian — and will be tied together by their composers’ love of the cinema.

Four composers will be featured during the concerts. The composers will include:

Nino Rota (below): Known for his collaboration Federico Fellini and on the Academy Award winning score for “The Godfather II”, his Nonet for Strings and Winds (at bottom in a YouTube video with Gidon Kremer’s chamber group)  is a roller-coaster ride of moods.

Bernard Herrmann (below): He composed a hauntingly beautiful Quintet for clarinet and strings that will showcase this Hollywood film composer famous for his film scores, especially for Alfred Hitchcock, in “Psycho,” “Vertigo,” “Cape Fear,” “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and “Citizen Kane.”

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (below): Setting the swashbuckling tone for “The Adventures of Robin Hood” and “The Sea Hawk,” in his substantive and delightful Piano Trio Korngold shows an incredible ability to convey mood with grand gestures.

Ian Honeyman (below): Originally from the Madison suburb of Oregon, Wisconsin, and now based in Los Angeles, the 34-year-old award-winning Honeyman has written music for dozens of feature films, short films, TV shows and was a collaborative composer and arranger on the best-selling film “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.”

His suite from the feature film, “Lilly the Witch: The Dragon and the Magic Book,” represents exciting work. Honeyman’s early influences include Oakwood Chamber Players violinist Leyla Sanyer.  He arranged excerpts from one of his movie scores for the Oakwood Chamber Players, which will receive its world premiere next weekend. 

As Honeyman told Oakwood Chamber Players flutist Marilyn Chohaney in a recent interview: “There is something about writing for a children’s adventure film that really resonates with me.”  He told her that he feels writing for a fantasy film allows him lots of room to explore unusual musical genres, because the stories themselves are outlandish.  The music can be more prominent than in a drama, in which a score is sometimes best when “it is not really that noticeable.”

“The Movies” concerts are part of National Chamber Music Month (NCMM), a nationwide initiative organized by Chamber Music America. For more information on NCMM, visit www.chamber-music.org/ncmm.

The Oakwood Chamber Players is a group of Madison-area professional musicians who have rehearsed and performed at Oakwood Village for 30 years.

Here is a link to the group’s website, where you can find out more and read the eomplete interview with composer Ian Honeyman:

http://www.oakwoodchamberplayers.com/index.htm

http://www.oakwoodchamberplayers.com/images/IanHoneymanInterview2013.pdf

The Oakwood Chamber Players is a professional music ensemble proudly supported by Oakwood Lutheran Senior Ministries and the Oakwood Foundation, in collaboration with Friends of the Arboretum, Inc.