Film Music the Focus of Frankly Music Concert

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Photo credit: Frank Almond

Music and movies have a relationship going back to the silent era. There has been a strong tradition of film music written by classical composers, and three of the greatest of these were the focus of the Frankly Music concert last week at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.

The program was of concert works by composers associated with film, rather than their actual cinematic scores, with one exception. Violinist Frank Almond and pianist Marika Bournaki gave a poetic rendition of the soulful Theme from Schindler’s List. I’ve heard Almond in this music before. This time around, the phrase was stretched a bit more; the color of the violin tone richly bloomed. The haunting piece appropriately felt like a profound lament.

Bernard Herrmann was famous for his Alfred Hitchcock scores. Composed in 1966, his Echoes string quartet conjures the same moodiness as his movie music. Sparse lines create tension, as if anxious dread, then moving into animated nervousness. The title seems to refer to both musical imitation between the instruments and also some kind of unsettled nostalgia.

Before Austrian-born Erich Wolfgang Korngold immigrated to the U.S. in 1934 to write scores for Hollywood films, he composed incidental music for plays, including for Much Ado About Nothing. Almond and Bournaki played three pieces from the set, the most memorable being a surreal, ironic “March of the Guard,” reminiscent of Sergei Prokofiev. I was blown away by Korngold’s Piano Quintet in E, Op. 15, composed at age 23. With the lushness of Richard Strauss or Sergei Rachmaninoff, and the stylized excesses of the Jugendstil movement, the constant emotion relentlessly spills forth. This performance was thrillingly spontaneous. The second movement Adagio was a prolonged verge-of-tears mood. The only noticeable flaw was a balance issue with the piano, which was too subdued at times, though wonderfully played by Bournaki.

Almond has a long record of engaging only top-flight artists for these concerts. Cellist Julian Schwartz’s deep tone shoots straight to the heart of a listener. Violinist Ilana Setapen and violist Nicholas Cords play with elegance that is an excellent match to Almond’s evolved playing.