The Son S 02

Joseph Vitarelli's (THE LAST SEDUCTION, SHE'S SO LOVELY, COMMANDMENTS) lush, orchestral score evokes a contemplative, playful, and sometimes haunting reflection of filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn's journey to piece together the life of his absent father, renowned architect Louis I. Kahn. The MY ARCHITECT soundtrack also features two vocal performances: the devotional "Call to Prayer" (a striking solo by a Muslim muezzin recorded on location at the mosque in Kahn's monumental National Assembly Building of Bangladesh) and the celebratory Hebrew hymn "Hayom Tamtzeinu" rendered with fervor by a cantor originally from Kahn's home city of Philadelphia. Included also on the soundtrack is a taped snippet of Louis Kahn himself in the visionary moment captured in a track called 'The Brick'. The documentary MY ARCHITECT was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, and won the hearts of audiences and critics alike, placing it on a large number of best film of the year lists.

Some albums exist outside of time or place, gently floating on their own style and sensibility. Of those, the La’s lone album may be the most beguiling, a record that consciously calls upon the hooks and harmonies of 1964 without seeming fussily retro, a trick that anticipated the cheerful classicism of the Brit-pop ’90s. But where their sons Oasis and Blur were all too eager to carry the torch of the past, Lee Mavers and the La’s exist outside of time, suggesting the ’60s in their simple, tuneful, acoustic-driven arrangements but seeming modern in their open, spacy approach, sometimes as ethereal as anything coming out of the 4AD stable but brought down to earth by their lean, no-nonsense attack, almost as sinewy as any unaffected British Invasion band.

The Chicago mainstay's debut album was a rough, gruff, no-nonsense affair typified by the decidedly unsentimental track "Your Love Is like a Cancer." Seals wasn't all that far removed from his southern roots at this point, and his slashing guitar work sports a strikingly raw feel on his originals "Look Now, Baby," "Cotton Picking Blues," and "Hot Sauce" (the latter a blistering instrumental that sounds a bit like the theme from Batman played sideways).

The Father, the Son and the Godfather is a snapshot from a time when art music escaped from the courts and churches. Domestic music-making in the company of close friends became a treasured extension of social interaction, and the resulting boom in ‘market opportunities’ offered composers a tremendous freedom in their choices of genres and styles, as demonstrated by this colourful programme. It features three composers whose music could not be more different, taking into account that all works were composed during the span of only two generations by authors who knew each other better than just well: J.S. Bach (the father), C.P.E. Bach (the son) and Georg Philipp Telemann (CPE’s godfather).

When I first discovered C.P.E Bach’s keyboard music, I remember being completely amazed by its versatility and originality, by its inventiveness, spectrum of expression and its boldness. I was equally astounded by how much he preceded his time, that only one generation away from his father’s High Baroque, and long before the Viennese Classical School fully flourished, he experimented so widely, pushed boundaries tirelessly, and in many ways laid the foundation for what was to become the Classical style. That he influenced Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven is clear and known, but one could also argue that he foreshadowed in certain ways the Romantic period.