Prospect recommends: New Babylon

 

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra plays music from the 1908 film "L'Assassinat du Duc de Guise"

New BabylonCity Halls, Glasgow, 28th October, Tel: 0141 353 8000; Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 29th October, Tel: 0131 668 2019

The Scottish Chamber Orchestra takes a break from Schumann, Beethoven and Berlioz to explore two rarely-heard film scores. A sharper contrast to the BBC Concert Orchestra’s sell-out performances of Hollywood blockbusters would be hard to find.

Camille Saint-Saëns’s elegant music for the historical melodrama L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (1908) is one of the first film scores to have been commissioned. At just over 15 minutes long, it was an epic by the standards of its time. To its septuagenarian composer it was probably a mere trifle: something to be filed away with the Uruguayan national anthem, “Hail California!” and other arcane commissions from his dotage. Yet the work’s belle époque soundworld of strings, piano and harmonium has immense charm.

Musicians and cinéastes may be more taken with Suite from New Babylon, Dmitri Shostakovich’s score for a 1929 satire on the Paris Commune. Shostakovich weaves together numerous musical styles with skill. Ironic detachment and bitter dismay collide in the juxtaposition of an Offenbachian gallop with the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” Quickly denounced as bourgeois by the Soviet authorities, it was the first of 36 film scores written by the former cinema pianist. A world removed from the illustrative “Mickey-Mousing” of Hollywood’s silent-movie composers, New Babylon still dazzles and shocks.