The Jameson International Film Festival isn’t just confined to the cinemas – there is an evening of Nino Rota’s film soundtrack work on at the National Concert Hall on February 22nd. Soundtrack legends don’t come much bigger than Rota, whose work includes scores for La Dolce Vita, Il Gattopardo, Amarcord and The Godfather among many, many others. European cinema would sound very different without his influence, so the chance to listen to some of his best known work in a concert setting will be a treat for film fans. David Brophy is the conducter of the DIT Symphony Orchestra and an unassuming music fanatic; he enthuses about Deep Purple, Steve Reich, Damon Albarn, Joseph Haydn and The White Stripes during our brief chat. Brophy will be in charge of the orchestra on the night so I ask him what difficulties arise from playing Nino Rota’s music in the absence of the visuals. “You generally don’t have the film although sometimes we do”, he tells me in a break before rehearsals. “We’ve done the remastered Wizard of Oz live – you know Dorothy singing Somewhere Over The Rainbow with the live concert orchestra playing along and it was amazing. Most of the time you don’t have the luxury of the actual film and you don’t even have stills. The luxury is when you record for film – I sometimes record in Windmill Lane. You have a TV screen beside you and they’re playing the film as you’re recording. So you get to see what’s going on. And there are recording studios in America now where the whole orchestra see a big screen, they literally record the whole orchestra in a cinema so you can play to visuals and see how your notes are going to blend with the film. So obviously when you’ve just an orchestra on the stage at the concert hall and you’ve no visual aspect, you have to use your imagination, but I suppose imagination is implicit in all types of music anyway whether it be film music or so called ‘classical music’. Imagination is part of it, you know.”
So many of Nino Rota’s soundtracks have taken on iconic status, they seem to transcend the films they were created for. Brophy agrees that these works are important enough and great enough to stand on their own merits. Listening to Rota’s perhaps best known piece it’s impossible to dispel the image of Marlon Brando. “In Nino Rota’s music you’re left in no doubt what it’s meant to depict. Apart from the strong visual images that go behind the music, the music can stand on its own as it’s very strong as well. The Godfather, I did it a couple of times before and apart from the opening trumpet solo, eventually when it gets into the, you know, the mandolins and the sort of guitars and that it sort of it does go into this slow almost death waltz and it’s melancholy, Italian and reminiscent of Italy and because The Godfather is an American film – even though it touches on aspects of culture from all around the world – there’s an element of jewishness in it as well as the Italian thing. I think that melancholy piece is like yearning for Italy. It’s that sort of yearning quality to it which I think is very strong.” The word ‘nostalgia’ crops up a lot in discussion of Nino Rota’s work, and Brophy has a theory about this: “I think Nino Rota’s not afraid to delve into old music or familiar music for his ideas. One of the cues for the concert is – I don’t even know the name of the piece – a famous circus piece (Sings what turns out to be Entry Of The Gladiators by Julius Fucik). That’s used in La Dolce Vita so I think he’s not afraid to take those things that we all know and use them. He’s not afraid to take classical composers’ ideas and use them, like the long Rossini crescendo, so he does have that nostalgia side to him, that yearning for times gone past or yearning for a different place from where he is now – that’s certainly a part of him and who he is. His style of writing is all in that as well. Even though this is an orchestral gig he doesn’t limit himself. He doesn’t say ‘oh I have an orchestra here so…you know…” He doesn’t just say “what the heck, let’s utilise this thing?” “No, he’s very clear on what instruments he wants to write for so a lot of La Dolce Vita for example doesn’t use any strings at all – it uses brass and woodwind and saxophones…” And of course there’s a terrific guitar riff that pops up from time to time throughout. “Yes, so he uses guitars, bass guitar, choirs – female voices… He has ‘il voce bianco’ – white voices – just that “ahhh” sort of sound over it, you know. He just says ‘No I want that particular sound there I want that particular sound here’ – he’s very specific, which is always easier to conduct.”
Before our time mulling over the merits of arguably Italy’s best known soundtrack composer (Ennio Morricone being a notable contender to the title) comes to a close, we get onto discussing the meeting points between classical music and rock. “We did a gig last October with Jon Lord (of Deep Purple). There’s a part of me that thinks we’ve been ruined by recording. I suppose with rock music you probably do go along to a gig and expect something different from what you get with a CD – the interaction, the improv, the playouts are a bit longer and so on. At a classical show you expect to hear what you have on the recording, note-perfect, in the hall and if [the audience] don’t get that they feel they’ve been sort of short-changed and I think that’s completely unhealthy. So you know I think I like the notion of a little bit more anarchy in concerts, I like the idea of things going wrong because I think that’s sort of real.” Not that one should expect anything to go wrong at the National Concert Hall of course, rather expect Nino Rota’s music and – in your mind’s eye at least, the films they accompanied – come to life.
Words: Ciaran Gaynor