Present Music Makes a ‘French Connection’

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J La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast) was less fairytale than surreal social satire. “My aim was to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty,” Cocteau said, “condemning her to a humdrum marriage and a future that I summed up in that last sentence of all fairytales: ‘And they had many children.’”

Cocteau’s enchanting picture, filmed with the soft gleam of hand-polished old silver, inspired one of Philip Glass’ many operas. He composed his La Belle et la Bête (1994), with the aid of computer technology, to synchronize precisely with the film and its dialogue. Glass’ La Belle is a Wagnerian Gesamkunstwerk for the multimedia age, intended to be performed alongside the film, as Present Music will do in its next concert, “French Connection.”

“Present Music has not done much Philip Glass in its history—a string quartet here, a toy piano piece there,” says Co-artistic Director Eric Segnitz. “So, we’re looking forward to sinking our teeth into this classic work. And yes, we will be doing the entire work,” not excerpts.

“I’ve had the pleasure to conduct several of Glass’ works, including another opera from his Cocteau trilogy,” adds PM’s New York-based Co-artistic Director David Bloom. “La Belle et la Bête is one of Glass’ most radical operas: in performance, Cocteau’s 1946 film is screened, but muted, Glass’ iconic music replacing the original sound. The singers provide a sort of live overdub, singing the exact words (en français) that the on-screen cast speak, in precisely matched rhythms. Subtitles are included in the screened film.”

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In the opera, the singers vocalize the dialogue as the pulsating composition, whose several motifs musically represent characters from the film, sets a mood that flits somewhere between darkness and light in a carnival ride across the emotional scale.

“We’ll have two singers from the Philip Glass Ensemble joining us, plus two new singers, and we’ll be premiering a version for 18 orchestral instruments, rather than the synth-based standard version. It’s a reduction of an as-of-yet unplayed orchestra version put together by the Glass team,” says Segnitz.

Cocteau was a grand old man of French arts and letters when Glass lived as a young student in Paris during the ‘50s and first saw his films. Back in America, he studied under one of Cocteau’s collaborators, composer Darius Milhaud. Glass’ French connections left an indelible mark on his thinking.

Present Music’s “French Connection” pairs La Belle with a film-based work by contemporary French composer Christophe Chassol whose music is written as scores for film footage from his world travels, including the Ganges River in India and New Orleans post-Katrina. Chassol’s Big Sun is a tribute to his birthplace, the French Caribbean island of Martinique.

“This will be the very first time we’ve played Chassol,” Segnitz says. “This piece is minimalist French pop-crossover music, a little hard to categorize, but about as catchy as new music gets! The film for which the music was written for will not be shown—we’ll be playing excerpts from the score.”

Bloom has already conducted Chassol in New York “and fell completely in love with his work right away,” he says. “I’m so glad we get to introduce his music to Milwaukee. Beyond working with folks like Frank Ocean and Solange, Chassol creates what he calls ‘ultrascores,’ his own method for ‘symphonizing the here and now,’ which could be a slogan for Present Music! His record Big Sun is what Chassol calls a ‘West Indian space odyssey,’ and we'll be playing some breathtaking fragments of the music.

Present Music’s “French Connection” is scheduled for 7:30 p.m., Sept. 11 at the Milwaukee Art Museum in conjunction with the museum’s exhibition “Always New: The Posters of Jules Chéret. For more information, visit presentmusic.org.