What are you listening to now?
- This topic has 658 replies, 15 voices, and was last updated 15 minutes ago by
.
-
Posts
-
I never got around to checking out his own music. I know I can google around, but before I do – how would you describe his music?
Esa‑Pekka Salonen’s music… what’s it like? Hmmm…. Maybe a mix of Debussy, Stravinsky, and a dash of Ligeti… Imagine those mixed up and served with crystal clear crushed ice-cubes (Salonen is Nordic, after all). There is a certain “filmic” quality to his music. Even when the orchestration is dense, the lines remain transparent. He treats the orchestra like a precision instrument, every sound matters, I guess the fact that he is both an excellent conductor and a studied composer enables him to write music that seems to be both highly complex and yet utterly clear and self evident. Hard to describe, at least for me. His “L.A. Variations” was the first piece of his I ever heard, and yep, for some reason, that reminds me of L.A. on a rainy day. It’s rhythmically propulsive (the percussion towards the end is just great) and composed by someone who exactly knows how to make every orchestral note count.
A 1969 travelogue film, I think, covering various countries. Rather obscure, but great stuff with an exotica twist. Stu gets to showcase his skills in weaving pop and jazz fusions into more classical ethnic landscapes.
The original recording of THE CHAIRMAN had pretty terrible sound quality, so this Kickstarter-funded re-recording by the Intrada/Leigh Phillips/William Stromberg/Royal Scottish National Orchestra team is a revelation. As usual, Goldsmith sounds terrific in his Far Eastern mode, with a seamless blend of the traditional symphony orchestra with eastern tonalities and instrumentation. They’ve done a great job here of using (or recreating the sound of) the many exotic wind and percussion instruments that Goldsmith used originally. And at 47 minutes, we’re getting an additional 15 minutes compared to the original release. So I guess this is pretty much complete.
Weird. Did he ever conduct a suite from THE RAINMAKER on some other album, perhaps, so that’s where the confusion stems from? He did do a lot of those film music albums.
Weird. Did he ever conduct a suite from THE RAINMAKER on some other album, perhaps, so that’s where the confusion stems from? He did do a lot of those film music albums.
No, but he scored a movie of the same title in 1997 😉
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119978/Yeah, that’s it, that’s what appears. It’s a wrong “cross designation” of North’s RAINMAKER with Bernstein’s. ROON relies on aggregated third party data, of course, and it’s obviously off here and mixes the background information of two completely unrelated film scores that happen to share the same title.
Didn’t see that one before. It can be easily corrected manually though.
Stumbled upon this on Youtube. Pretty impressive how good sound libraries and in this case string libraries sound and all sound different:
Infectious, orchestral-romantic swell for this 2014 John Woo film. Iwashiro almost always delivers. I discovered him via THE DOG OF FLANDERS in 1997 already, but I also recommend FUKUSHIMA 50 from 2020 and A LIGHT IN THE HARBOR, released last year (I mini-reviewed that one here). And THE RED CLIFF, obviously, also for Woo.
My first own Pat Metheny album, way back on LP, though I had heard some of his music before, because a school-friend of mine was a fan. (Was a kick for both of us when they collaborated on UNDER FIRE.)
Pat Metheny would now and then venture again into film territory, his first full feature film score was John Schlesinger’s THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN.Classic Blanchard for Spike, with its powerful jazz Americana. One of my favourite scores of 2020. It was cool to hear how Blanchard’s orchestrator Howard Drossin provided a similarly styled score for Lee’s HIGHEST 2 LOWEST last year, when Blanchard was probably busy with the Hurricane Katrina documentary for Netflix.
Didn’t know Drossin is Blanchard’s regular orchestrator (since “forever” as I just checked out). I only encountered him with THE MAN WITH THE IRON FISTS he scored with RZA. Nice quite groovy one.
arte had shown a live broadcast of a concert of Francis Lai’s music yesterday:
https://www.arte.tv/de/videos/131033-001-A/die-filmmusik-von-francis-lai/I have not watched it yet and just clicked a little into it. It starts with a (unrelated) commission premiere apparently but includes a Lai hommage by Gabrial Yared who also performed on piano himself. The track list on the site seems to be at random order as that seems to be somewhere in the middle (at least I spotted Yared there).
It’s probably geo blocked on the site as usual but as often it might show up on youtube some time later.
Cool! I love Lai. Wish we had something like Arte up here. The video actually displays for me, even though I’m in another country.
And Nick….Glass spurred on by the recent Kennedy Center event?
Cool! I love Lai. Wish we had something like Arte up here. The video actually displays for me, even though I’m in another country.
Great, apparently not everything is geo blocked if outside Germany or France.
I picked up and fell in love with The Dog and the Future by French indie duo Agar Agar in 2018, when I was in Berlin for a few weeks.
If John Carpenter and Philip K. Dick might have ever considered to make a minimalist melancholy art pop album together, that’s what it may have sounded like.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.