Roll camera! NWS goes to the movies, performing selections from Hollywood films like Ben-Hur; Schindler’s List; Lawrence of Arabia; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; The Wizard of Oz and more. In the director’s seat for this special performance is Richard Kaufman, renowned pops conductor, who will also be joined by violinist Philippe Quint. Select works will be accompanied by film clips projected over the orchestra. 

Program

Alfred Newman

20th Century Fox Fanfare (1933)

Alfred Newman made the leap from Broadway conductor to Hollywood composer in the early 1930s, scoring films for Charlie Chaplin and the producer Samuel Goldwyn. He composed the 20th Century Fox Fanfare in 1933 to accompany the logo of that new studio, beginning a fruitful relationship that lasted for decades. The Fanfare had fallen out of use by the 1970s, but director George Lucas insisted that it be included in the original release of Star Wars in 1977, launching its revival that continues to this day.

Richard A. Whiting

“Hooray for Hollywood” from Hollywood Hotel (1937)

“Hooray for Hollywood” first appeared as the opening number of a comedy from 1937 directed by Busby Berkeley, who showed off his signature visual style in a scene featuring the Benny Goodman Orchestra marching onto the tarmac to board a plane for Los Angeles. This instrumental arrangement by Hollywood legend John Williams has become the unofficial anthem of the Academy Awards.

Erich Korngold

“March of the Merry Men” from The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

As a successful opera composer in Vienna, Erich Korngold was already a master of grandiose, vivid scene-painting by the time he was recruited to compose film scores in Hollywood. His operatic sense of drama is especially evident in the Oscar-winning score for The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring the dashing Errol Flynn as the egalitarian outlaw from Sherwood Forest. This excerpt shows off the swashbuckling flavor of Korngold’s score, a perfect backdrop to Robin Hood’s escapades in those vibrant green tights (a miracle of the Technicolor process).

Elmer Bernstein

Theme from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Elmer Bernstein was among the upper echelon of Hollywood composers a generation after the first great wave of European immigrants. From The Ten Commandments (1956) to Ghostbusters (1984) and Cape Fear (1991), Bernstein’s evocative scores demonstrate an uncanny staying power and adaptability. His theme music for To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) captures both the innocence and tension that play out in this classic film adaptation starring Gregory Peck.

Maurice Jarre

Overture to Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

The French composer Maurice Jarre won the first of his three Oscars for Lawrence of Arabia, which sets up the epic sweep of the film with a lush, percussive Overture. He went on to win again for Doctor Zhivago (1965) and A Passage to India (1984), all created for films directed by David Lean.

Bernard Herrmann

** Prelude and Finale from Citizen Kane (1941)

Bernard Hermann had an uncanny ability to heighten the innermost emotions of any scene, making him a favorite partner of some of film’s most uncompromising auteurs. His first great partnership was with Orson Welles, including music for Citizen Kane in 1941. He went on to score many of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic films (Psycho, North by Northwest and Vertigo, among others), and he died just after completing the gritty score for Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver.

John Williams

Theme from Schindler's List (1994)

John Williams—the man responsible for the music of Jaws, Star Wars, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Harry Potter movies and so many other unforgettable themes—has amassed an astonishing 52 Oscar nominations, with five wins and counting, including his music for Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s powerful portrayal of a German businessman and the many Jews he saved from Nazi concentration camps. The Theme features a plaintive violin solo (recorded on the soundtrack by Itzhak Perlman), a sound that echoes the musical traditions of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe.

Charlie Chaplin

“Tango Bitterness” from Monsieur Verdoux (1947)

Charlie Chaplin is so well known for directing and starring in his own movies that his talents as a composer are often forgotten. He took a stab at a tango in a 1947 dark comedy that marked a major shift for him, when he dropped the “Little Tramp” character to play a serial killer who marries and slays wealthy widows.

Ennio Morricone

Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso (1988)

The Italian composer Ennio Morricone first made a splash writing music for “Spaghetti Westerns” directed by Sergio Leone, earning a place among the immortals of movie music through The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), with its ocarinas, surf guitar and whistling. In 1988 Morricone produced maybe the greatest love theme ever projected in a theater in this recurring melody from Cinema Paradiso.

Max Steiner

** “The Empire State Building” from King Kong (1933)

Max Steiner, born into an Austrian family of theater producers, brought his solid training from the Vienna Conservatory and his early knack for light operetta when he relocated to New York at the start of World War I. In 1929, in the very early years of “talkies”, he was recruited by the Hollywood studio RKO, where in 1933 he composed the fantastical score for King Kong that helped set the precedent for injecting Wagnerian drama from the opera house into film scores.

Miklós Rózsa

** Selections from Ben-Hur (1959)

The Hungarian-born composer Miklós Rózsa spent the early parts of his career in Paris and London, but the outbreak of World War II drove him, like so many of his European counterparts, to pursue opportunities in the United States. Rózsa had already tried his hand at film scoring before his first trip to Hollywood in 1939, but he soon became a top practitioner in that crowded field. His Oscar-winning score for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1945 film Spellbound gave many theatergoers their first taste of the theremin, that spooky electronic instrument, while his more traditional, brassy score for Ben-Hur (1959) earned that film one of its record-breaking 11 Academy Awards.

Tan Dun

Crouching Tiger Concerto (2000)

Following studies at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, composer Tan Dun moved to New York in 1986 for doctoral work at Columbia University. He has honed a distinctive sound that draws on his experiences growing up in rural Hunan province and playing violin with a Peking opera troupe, combined with contemporary ideas of texture and drama rooted in New York’s avant-garde art and music scenes. His works appear in concert halls and opera houses around the world, but perhaps no project has done more to advance his name than the music he provided for Ang Lee’s blockbuster film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which earned Tan both Oscar and Grammy Awards in 2000. He reworked excerpts of the film score to create the Crouching Tiger Cello Concerto, drawing on the prominent music for solo cello already featured in the soundtrack.

Harold Arlen

** Selections from The Wizard of Oz (1939)

Like many of the core contributors to the Great American Songbook, Harold Arlen (born Hyman Arluck) was raised amid the devotional singing and festive dance music of Jewish immigrants. He worked as a house songwriter for The Cotton Club in Harlem in the early 1930s, where he wrote the hit “Stormy Weather” that was first sung by Ethel Waters, and from there he leapt to California to write songs for movie musicals. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer hired Arlen and his lyricist partner “Yip” Harburg to write songs for The Wizard of Oz, and Arlen struggled mightily to find the right tone for the ballad to be sung by the 16-year-old Judy Garland, until that immortal melody, starting with its hopeful leap up the octave, came to him while out for a drive with his wife. “Over the Rainbow” ended up winning the Oscar for best original song. Arlen had less work to do with the Scarecrow’s comic introduction, since all it took was new lyrics from Harburg to create “If I Only Had a Brain” out of a song of theirs that had been cut from an earlier Broadway musical.

John Williams

“The Devil’s Dance” from The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

To conjure the diabolical mood of “The Devil’s Dance” in the macabre comedy The Witches of Eastwick, John Williams revisited the imagined link between the devil and certain type of fiery fiddling that has fascinated the likes of Tartini, Paganini, Saint-Saëns, Stravinsky and so many other composers over the ages.

John Morris

“Transylvanian Lullaby” from Young Frankenstein (1974)

John Morris wrote the music for Mel Brooks’ first film in 1967, The Producers, and they teamed up for a total of 20 movies. With the “Transylvanian Lullaby” from Young Frankenstein, Morris proved why he was a perfect match for Brooks’ brand of irreverent comedy—because parody only works when one has total command of the source material being skewered.

Charlie Chaplin

“Smile” from Modern Times (1936)

Charlie Chaplin wrote his most famous song, “Smile,” as an instrumental theme for Modern Times in 1936, and it became a jazz standard with the addition of lyrics in 1954. Like so much of Chaplin’s double-edged comedy, there is a profound sadness and world-weariness to this melody that urges a smile no matter what life throws at you.

Franz Waxman

“Ride of the Cossacks” from Taras Bulba (1962)

To put himself through music school in Berlin, Franz Waxman played American-style jazz in nightclubs. That side gig led to Waxman’s first job in the film industry, working as an orchestrator and conductor at a German studio in 1929. Five years later he relocated to California, where he made an immediate impact with his first original score for Hollywood: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). He was ultimately nominated for 12 Academy Awards, and he took home Oscars in two consecutive years, for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951). For the 1962 period piece Taras Bulba about a Cossack army fighting for independence from Polish conquerors, Waxman created this thrilling ride for the equestrian warriors.

-- © 2022 Aaron Grad

Aaron Grad is a composer and writer based in Seattle. In addition to providing program notes for the New World Symphony, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and others, he is also the artistic director of Many Messiahs, a project that reframes George Frideric Handel's masterpiece as a collective call for justice.

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