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Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur (1959), directed by William Wyler.
© 1959 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
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The Salomon Orchestra’s new season has the theme Stage and Screen, and conductor Graham Ross joins the orchestra on Saturday 18 October at Smith Square Hall to launch the season with a concert featuring music by Miklós Rózsa, Zoltán Kodály and Nino Rota, Subsequent concerts feature ballet music by Ravel and Stravinsky, dance by Leonard Bernstein, and opera by Prokofiev.
Despite writing close to 100 film scores and receiving 17 Academy Award nominations including three Oscars for Spellbound (1945), A Double Life (1947), and Ben-Hur (1959), Rózsa retained a firm allegiance to concert life, writing concert works including concertos for violinist Jascha Heifetz and cellist Janos Starker.
The concert opens with the suite from Miklós Rózsa’s Oscar-winning score for Ben-Hur – widely considered his greatest. The score was, at the time, the longest ever composed for a film. It was described by Roger Hickman as “the last universally acknowledged score created in the classical Hollywood tradition prior to Star Wars”. The score was so lengthy that it had to be released on three LPs and to make it more listenable Rózsa arranged the score into his Ben-Hur Suite, which was issued on disc in 1959.
Kodály’s Háry János is a folk opera based on János Garay’s comic poem “The Veteran” (Az obsitos) about a drunkard named Háry János. The work was premiered in 1926 in Budapest but its extensive use of spoken dialogue means that transmission has been limited and the opera had to wait until 1982 for its UK stage premiere at the Buxton Festival. Kodály extracted a suite from the opera. This premiered in 1927 in Barcelona and has gone on to have a far greater popularity than the opera itself.
Kodály wrote in his preface to the score: “Háry is a peasant, a veteran soldier who day after day sits at the tavern spinning yarns about his heroic exploits… the stories released by his imagination are an inextricable mixture of realism and naivety, of comic humour and pathos.”
Nino Rota is another film composer who retained a foot in the classical concert world. Best known for his scores for films by Fellini and Visconti, he wrote more than 150 scores for films from the 1930s until his death in 1979 and won an Oscar for his score for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film, The Godfather Part II.
His score for Fellini’s 1954 film, La Strada was written after principal photography was complete. The film stars Giulietta Masina as a simple-minded young woman bought from her mother by Anthony Quinn, a brutish strongman who takes her with him on the road. Fellini routinely shot his films while playing taped music and for La Strada this included a variation by Arcangelo Corelli that he planned to use on the sound track. Rota, unhappy with that plan, wrote an original motif with rhythmic lines matched to Corelli’s piece that synchronize with the actors’ movements. In 1966, Rota wrote a ballet, La Strada for La Scala, Milan using music from the film and this forms the basis for his suite which ends the concert.
Full details of the concert from the Sinfonia Smith Square website, and details of Salomon Orchestra’s full season from their website.
