Eastman Showcase 2006
A Little Love Music
A Little Love Music
The recent Disney/Touchstone picture Casanova, starring Heath Ledger as the 18th-century’s most legendary lover, has an important Eastman School connection. Enhancing the movie’s lavish Venetian settings was a soundtrack of excerpts from works by a panoply of Baroque composers: Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Albinoni, and many more. Pulling them all together was arranger and orchestrator Sonny Kompanek (MA ’73), whose long list of Hollywood credits also includes A Knight’s Tale, Gods and Monsters, Three Kings, and The Big Lebowski.
Sonny calls the project “one of the most rewarding experiences I have ever had,” adding “This was a very ambitious endeavor on the part of a major film studio -- to have a film score employ the best Baroque players in New York and L.A. … The players were used to playing traditional Baroque works in a concert situation, and are specialists in this music. For the film, they had to play with a click track and make many changes on the spot. I must say they rose to the occasion most admirably and met some very demanding changes with the greatest artistry I have ever seen in a recording environment.” Their combined artistry paid off: the Casanova CD was #1 on the Billboard Classical Chart throughout the month of February.
Those talented artists, by the way, included trumpeter John Thiessen (BM ’87), percussionist Joe Tompkins (BM ’92), organist Jon Werking (MM ’85), bassist Louise Koby (BM ’77), and violinist Judson Griffin (BM ’73) — not to mention Eastman professor Paul O’Dette as lute and mandolin soloist.
The Casanova soundtrack CD is available on Hollywood Records.
Amplifying the Avant-garde
Graduate student Lauren Radnofsky has a fine reputation for her performing of contemporary music. The cellist added to it considerably on February 17, with a concert of music for amplified cello and electronics -- not in a recital hall, but in the atrium outside The Bop Shop, a Rochester record store. “I thought her avant-garde sound would be a nice addition to our jazz series,” says Tom Kohn, the Bop Shop’s owner, who has a fine reputation of his own for supporting adventurous music and performers of all kinds. The Rochester press agreed. The Democrat & Chronicle previewed Lauren’s concert, which consisted of music by Kaija Saariaho, Michael Gordon, and Eastman assistant professor of conducting (and prolific composer) Brad Lubman. Lauren also played her own piece, Very Badly Performed -- not a phrase which City Newspaper’s Frank De Blase would have used to describe her playing; he wrote in his review, “it was hard to take your eyes off Radnofsky’s intensity…her music conjured actual images with its bowed onomatopoeia.”