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Live Cinema London
Barbican
11/17/1998 -
Sadler's Wells
17 November 1998
Erich von Stroheim The Wedding March
Carl Davis (arranger, conductor)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Barbican
23 November 1998
Philip Glass Koyaanisqatsi Live!
Michael Riesman (conductor)
Philip Glass Ensemble and Guests The past week in London has seen two contrasting, but equally outstanding,
performances of films with full-scale live music. The Wedding March
with Carl Davies' Viennese-based score reveals the operatic grandeur and
irony of the film in its awful glory. Koyaanisqatsi, a club zone-out
with hippy associations in the cinema fifteen years ago, has an edge and
freshness when peformed live, even though it has been ripped off
ubiquitously.
Stroheim's The Wedding March is set in 1914, three years after
Rosenkavelier was written, and was made in 1928, the same year as
Arabella, and also Der Dreisgroschenoper. It presents a view
of the lost operetta world of Vienna, from the point of view of a cynical
but ambitious hatter's son. Stroheim casts himself as Nicki, an aristocrat
who falls for working-class Fay Wray, apparently seeing himself as an
operetta hero. But he looks like Ochs all along, and ends up walking down
the aisle with saintly, limping Zasu Pitts, daughter of a social-climbing
merchant of corn-plasters. (Pitts is very moving, in spite of cliched
decor and her reputation in comedy.) Nicki's gargoyle parents are
apparently the result of a previous similar match.
Carl Davies' score is arranged from Viennese music of all kinds, a handful
of familiar walzes, Wienerblut and The Blue Danube, but also
Schubert's Aufenthalt for the sinister Iron Man (the figure on top
of St Stephen's cathedral, who plays a symbolic role in the action as the
embodiment of male aggression). Davis uses Mozart's Ave Verum and a
traditional Catholic hymn for the elaborate Corpus Christi procession
which, with superb nastiness and elaborate presentation, forms the climax
and centre of the film. The wedding march from Lohengrin gets only a
few allusive notes, over the titles, and at the end. Stroheim didn't get to
complete the film, but it seems possible that he intended the glorious
theme of its title not to appear, and to be overshadowed by the
hypocritical pageant of Viennese tradition.
Whereas Davis and the London Philharmonic brilliantly bring out the meaning
of the film as it was originally intended, and must have been understood by
its audience, Philip Glass composed Koyaanisqatsi as an integral
part of Godfrey Reggio's film. Glass' music stands alone as an
archetypical, and typically architectural, big composition in eleven
movements of increasing intensity and anxiety, all based on a single
rhythmic shape and a limited range of melodic techniques, but building up
textures and contrasts dramatically. Pre-recorded, the music is a part of
the mechanism implicit in the movement of the image (though more stable
than anything on the screen). Heard live with the film, it adds a slight
element of sympathy to the beautiful but brutal images, of the desert,
cities and people seen as moving geometric patterns going out of control.
The Philip Glass Ensemble (with Glass himself playing the trademark opening
organ notes and pedal notes on the keyboard) gave an electrifying
performance, although the musicians' need for lights on the stage in front
of the screen meant that picture quality of the film was less than ideal.
Sadler's Wells, in contrast, has a proper orchestra pit and impeccable
projection.
H.E. Elsom
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