Last night I attended the opening of Matthew Bourne’s new ballet, The Red Shoes at the Ahmanson Theatre. I think this is one of the best of Bourne’s works and one key reason is his inventive choice for music.
The show is based on the classic 1948 film from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and also the fairytale by Hans Christian Anderson. When it came to music for the film, Powell & Pressburger enlisted Brian Easdale to score this story of a ballerina torn between her love for the composer who wrote her a ballet and the impresario who runs the ballet company and controls her career.
But Bourne went a different path. Instead of using that score, he opted to use various scores and compositions by legendary film composer Bernard Herrmann. If the name isn’t familiar to you, his music certainly is. Many of Alfred Hitchcock’s films (Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo) were made even more compelling by Herrmann’s work. As were such films as Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and the landmark Orson Welles film Citizen Kane.
Parts of the score from Kane are used in The Red Shoes. Also adapted are selections from Fahrenheit 451, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and some non-film compositions such as Concerto Macabre and the Currier and Ives Suite. The music works so well that you’d think it had been written for this ballet.
It had me wondering, what other composers and their music would be right for such an undertaking. So Mr. Bourne, I recommend first and foremost the work of Elmer Bernstein. I’d love to see his scores for The Age of Innocence and Far From Heaven in a ballet. And if you have a particularly comedic moment may I recommend some of his work from Ghostbusters.
Combining music from different works is exactly the same as taking chapters from different books and arbitrarily combining them together. The result can only be incoherence. It’s amazing that people like this spend so much time on everything else and then slap music on it in such an amateurish manner.
Is that opinion based on having see the show or just an intellectual response? Just curious.
Both. And it doesn’t just apply to this show, it applies to any show. Even Bernard Herrmann himself thought an approach like this is utter nonsense.
I reiterate:
“Combining music from different works is exactly the same as taking chapters from different books and arbitrarily combining them together. The result can only be incoherence.”
Can’t you hear how none of the music goes together? It’s painfully obvious. Each “quote” is constructed from completely different motives, different intents, etc etc. All totally unrelated to each other at every level. Sigh. All you have to do is listen.