Total Film 2019

Seattle’s Jazz Hall of Fame ‘Avant Goddess’ has produced her 17th solo recording, featuring beautiful multi-instrumental 'world soul' music sung in English and Serbo-Croatian, silent film soundtracks, commissioned compositions, and whimsical songs.
Amy Denio is a Seattle-based multi-instrumental composer of soundtracks for modern dance, film and theater, as well as a songwriter and music improviser. Often called an unclassifiable avant-garde jazz musician, her main instruments are voice, alto saxophone, clarinet, accordion, acoustic and electric guitars, electric bass, and theremin.

Per Nørgård (b. 1932) is one of the most frequently played composers of his generation. He has written more than 400 works in all genres and inspired innumerable colleagues in Denmark and abroad. This album presents all of Nørgård’s music for the Oscarwinning Babette’s Feast film version by Gabriel Axel of Karen Blixen’s short story – not just the snatches of it one can hear in the film. One can also get to know the hypnotic Spell, the ripples and bubbles in Whirl’s World and Trio Breve, which according to the composer himself are to be regarded as three short expressive phrases – dream-like pictures – that change between light and dark, fast and slow but with introvert melodic features in common.

In 1985, Philip Glass composed a 'dance-theater' work based on Edgar Allen Poe’s 1841 short story 'A Descent into the Maelstrom' as one of the last pieces written for the original Philip Glass Ensemble (keyboards and woodwinds.) A few years ago Norwegian filmmaker Jan Vardøen decided to make a film about the Poe’s story which is set in the Arctic Circle near the Lofoten archipelago in northern Norway. At the same time, Vardøen discovered Philip Glass Ensemble recording of the work. As part of his film, Vardøen conscripted the Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra and arranger Alexander Waaktar to adapt the music for full symphony orchestra, voice, and synthesizer, all under the baton of Tim Weiss. The result is a dramatic new interpretation of a little known major Philip Glass work. This new recording from Orange Mountain Music marks the first recording of this dynamic piece in this new orchestral form.

When Toscanini encouraged Nino Rota to study at the Curtis Institute, where instructions by Fritz Reiner and a friendship with Aaron Copland awaited the precocious composer, it was already clear he would have a massive career. Only the direction wasn’t certain yet. It turned out to be classical music and film music, the former informing the latter. Notable when you listen to the delicious waltz Rota from War & Peace or the darkly humorous snippets from the very apropos Orchestra Rehearsal. And while the de-facto horn concertino Castel del Monte, inspired by King Frederick II’s famous medieval castle in southern Italy, isn’t technically film music, it very much sounds like music to a fantasy film of Rota’s imagining.

The symphonic output of George Antheil, the selfproclaimed ‘bad boy of music’, is further investigated by the BBC Philharmonic and its Chief Guest Conductor, John Storgårds, in the second album of the series. Following his early experimentations with modernist ideas as an enfant terrible in 1920s Paris, the stylistic trajectory of his symphonies over the next decades mirrors his self-confessed desire to learn more orthodox compositional techniques. This album explores two more of his symphonies: Symphony No. 3 (compl. 1946), only one movement of which was performed during Antheil’s lifetime, and Symphony No. 6 (compl. 1950), in which the influences of Shostakovich and Ives make themselves heard.

This film by Jean Eptein is the adaptation of a new eponymous Edgar Poe. For Kafka, the musical intention was to transmit on an emotional level, through the writing of the soundtrack, the anguishing and strange atmosphere that transpires throughout the film in each image.