This week on “The Lost Chord,” nothing attracts samurai and radiation-induced thunder-lizards like cherry blossoms.
We’ll enjoy concert music by two Japanese composers – both close friends – best recognized for their work in film. Akira Ifukube studied with Alexander Tcherepnin. Though his “Japanese Rhapsody” of 1935 won first prize in an international contest judged by Albert Roussel, Jacques Ibert, and Arthur Honegger, among others, financial considerations led him to write 250 film scores. Undoubtedly, he is best known for his music for Godzilla.
Humiwo Hayasaka was Akira Kurosawa’s composer of choice, writing music for classic films such as “Rashomon” and “Seven Samurai.” He wrote over 100 film scores in all, before his early death from tuberculosis at the age of 41. Prominent Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu (who later scored Kurosawa’s “Dodes’kaden”) claimed Hayasaka as a formative influence. We’ll hear Hayasaka’s Piano Concerto, composed in 1948. The first movement is a massive elegy for the composer’s brother and all the dead of the Second World War; and the second, a contrasting movement of conspicuous playfulness.
Incidentally, Ifukube was also responsible for creating Godzilla’s trademark roar, which was produced by running a resin-covered leather glove along the loosened strings of a double bass. Experience this distinctive call as a sort of intermezzo, between works by the composer of “Godzilla” and that of “Seven Samurai” on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon!
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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
https://kwax.uoregon.edu
Tag: Akira Kurosawa
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Japanese Composers in Bloom on “The Lost Chord”
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Kurosawa Film Music Seven Samurai & More
This week on “Picture Perfect,” carve out some time for music from the films of Akira Kurosawa. We’ll hear selections from three historical classics by the influential Japanese director.
“Seven Samurai” (1954) concerns a band of ronin who come together to defend a farmers’ village against invading brigands. The simplicity of that synopsis doesn’t begin to hint at what a marvelous achievement it really is. In fact, “Seven Samurai” is regularly included on lists of the greatest films of all time. It was remade in the United States as “The Magnificent Seven.” And though “The Magnificent Seven” enjoys great popularity, a terrific cast, and an unforgettable film score by Elmer Bernstein, the movie itself stands only knee-high to the original. The music is by Fumio Hayazaka.
“Seven Samurai” was Kurosawa’s first, full-out samurai film, but a samurai does feature as one of the characters in his earlier, break-out international hit, “Rashomon” (1950). In this instance, the discovery of a murdered samurai leads to a series of courtroom-style examinations, during which everyone present at the killing gives his or her own account of what transpired – including (through a medium) the murdered man himself! The conflicting testimonies reveal the slippery subjectivity of what we understand as “truth.” The film, the first from Japan to receive wide exposure abroad, had such an impact that the term “Rashomon effect” entered the English language.
Kurosawa had great respect not only for American movies, but also Western classical music. This led him, on occasion, to request of his composers that they emulate certain well-known pieces. In the case of “Rashomon,” Hayazaka was encouraged, during one of the segments, to channel Ravel’s “Bolero.” “Rashomon” was remade as, among other things, “The Outrage,” a middling western starring Paul Newman.
Masura Sato sought out Hayazaka as a teacher on the merits of his music for “Rashomon.” Following his master’s early death from tuberculosis at the age of 41, Sato stepped in to fill the void as Kurosawa’s composer of choice. Sato would score eight of Kurosawa’s films (his first, a completion of Hayazaka’s score for “Record of a Living Being”). He too could be called upon to conjure the spirit of Western composers, with the ghost of Verdi hovering over “Throne of Blood,” Haydn and Brahms coloring “Red Beard,” and in the case of “Yojimbo” (1961), Franz Liszt lending attitude to masterless samurai Toshiro Mifune, who wanders into a remote town and sets about playing two rival families off one another to his own profit.
“Yojimbo” provided the basis for the first of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, “A Fistful of Dollars.” What’s interesting about that is not only Leone’s reliance on the scene-by-scene structure of the plot, but also that its composer, Ennio Morricone, emulated the kind of goofy juxtapositions and unexpected orchestrations used by Sato in the original film. Kurosawa himself was inspired by the western tropes of John Ford movies and the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett.
As a bonus, I will include just a little music from one of my least favorite Kurosawa films (beside “Rhapsody in August”), “Dodes’kaden” (1970). “Dodes’kaden” marked a break with Kurosawa’s classic style. It was his first film shot in color, for one thing – truly lurid Technicolor – and the first made after his break with Mifune (who was brilliant in “Rashomon,” “Seven Samurai” and “Yojimbo,” among others). The title can be translated, roughly, as “clickety-clack,” the sound of an imaginary trolley car in the fantasy world of a mentally-challenged boy who literally lives in a dump. Though it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, its commercial failure drove Kurosawa into a deep depression and even to attempted suicide.
For as much as I personally dislike the film, the composer of its soundtrack, Toru Takemitsu is regarded as one of Japan’s most important classical concert composers. Interestingly, like Sato, Takemitsu was a protégé of Kurosawa’s friend and frequent colleague, Fumio Hayazaka.
I hope you’ll join me for an hour of Kurosawa classics (AND “Dodes’kaden”), on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
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Armchair Travel Winter Films Classic Cinema
With the hustle and bustle of the holidays for the most part behind us and temperatures plummeting, January is a great time of year for armchair travel.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” cozy in, but get a world view, as we drift beyond our shores for an hour of wintry scenes from world cinema, with entries from England, Finland, the Soviet Union, and Japan.
Akira Kurosawa’s “Dersu Uzala” (1975) is one of the best of his later films, although it seems to have faded into the shadows of “Kagemusha” and “Ran.” The plot centers on an early 20th century friendship between a Russian explorer and an East Asian trapper and hunter, who acts as his guide. This would be the last of Kurosawa’s works to be recognized with an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The music is by Isaac Schwartz.
Snow again is in abundance in Finland’s “The White Reindeer” (1952). Set in Lapland, it tells the tale of a lonely herder’s wife, who visits a local shaman and is transformed into a shapeshifting, vampiric hind. The film was honored at the Cannes Film Festival with a special award for Best Fairy Tale Film, and at the Golden Globes as Best Foreign Film. Einar Englund wrote the music.
Sergei Prokofiev’s concert suite from “Lieutenant Kijé” (1934) is very well known, but for some reason the film is not. In fact, it has been widely circulated in program notes that the film was never actually completed, which is false. It has not been available for purchase in the U.S. for as long as I can remember, but you can watch it here:
Why The Criterion Collection has never gotten around to this one, I don’t know, but I’m sure there must be an explanation. The famous sleigh-ride, the “Troika,” begins just before the 45-minute mark. Note that the baritone on the soundtrack is none other than the composer himself, who thought the original singer employed for the purpose too refined.
Finally, we head to the South Pole with Robert Falcon Scott, for “Scott of the Antarctic” (1948). England’s Ealing Studios is probably best recognized for its classic comedies of the 1950s, many of them starring Alec Guinness. There’s not much funny about this harrowing true story, with John Mills as Scott and the most celebrated film score by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Vaughan Williams’ music perfectly reflects the sublime, austere beauty of an impenetrable wilderness. Material from the score was later reworked and incorporated into his Symphony No. 7, the “Sinfonia Antartica” (using the Italian spelling.)
Don’t forget your gloves and a hat! It’s a small world of cold this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, now in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon!
Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EST/5:00 PM PST
SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – ALL NEW! – Saturday at 11:00 AM EST/8:00 AM PST
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EST/4:00 PM PST
Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!
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Living Remake: Nighy vs. Kurosawa
Last night, I finally got around to watching “Living,” a fairly good remake of Akira Kurosawa’s (let’s face it) untouchable classic, “Ikiru” (1952). Bill Nighy plays a tight-buttoned public servant, a hidebound functionary, referred to behind his back by a young coworker as “Mr. Zombie.” (She gets out before she’s worn down on the lathe.) He seems all the world as if he’s stepped from a Magritte painting, though lacking any sense of the surreal. At least until the day he is forced to come to terms with his unremarkable life, frittered away in routine, silently riding the steam railroad back and forth to London to sit in a quiet office behind a heavy desk and dutifully pass the buck in the Public Works Department. It is an existence without drama, without personality, and woefully without consequence. Suddenly, late in the game, he is forced to self-examine and grapple in his understated way (it is, after all, Bill Nighy) with finding meaning and grace in his final months.
The film is gorgeously executed, though perhaps a bit too seductive to successfully reflect the dour world of the bureaucrat. I understand the drama, such that it is, is in transformation. But from the get-go, the workaday is captured so alluringly. Everyone heads off to work impeccably dressed in period costume, filing past spotless, stately architecture and bright double-decker buses. Everything is bathed in sunlight. The film’s titles are self-consciously retro. Dvořák whirls gracefully on the soundtrack. If this is what it’s like to live the life of a cog, sign me up!
To lend further verisimilitude to the enterprise – another exercise in “Masterpiece Theatre porn” guaranteed to titillate fans of “Downton Abbey” – the screenplay is by Merchant-Ivory scribe Kuzuo Ishiguro.
But the real reason I mention the film at all is that in its closing moments, what should well up on the soundtrack, but the “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” Chalk up another victory for Ralph Vaughan Williams.
“Living” is now available for streaming, if you want to check it out. But watch “Ikiru” first.
PHOTOS: Bill Nighy (left) and Takashi Shimura, in the swing
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Kurosawa’s Cinematic Music: A Samurai Soundscape
Any classical music station that would drop “Picture Perfect” must be dull as a blunt katana. Fortunately, those of us who care about the preservation and dissemination of classic film music can stay sharp with a playlist drawn from the films of Akira Kurosawa this week on KWAX.
“Seven Samurai” (1954) is a three-and-a-half-hour epic on a deceptively simple premise: a ragtag company of ronin is assembled to defend a farmers’ village against marauding brigands. Of course, that capsule synopsis doesn’t begin to hint at what a marvelous achievement it really is. “Seven Samurai” is regularly included on short lists of the greatest films of all time. It was remade in the United States as “The Magnificent Seven.” And though “The Magnificent Seven” enjoys great popularity, a terrific cast, and an unforgettable score, it stands only knee-high to the original, with music by Fumio Hayazaka.
“Seven Samurai” may have been Kurosawa’s first, full-out samurai film, but it was not his first crack at jidaigeki (literally “period drama”). Already, a samurai features as one of the characters in his earlier, international break-out hit, “Rashomon” (1950). In this instance, the discovery of a murdered samurai leads to a series of courtroom-style examinations, during which everyone present at the killing gives his or her own account of what transpired – including (through a medium) the murdered man himself! The conflicting testimonies reveal the slippery subjectivity of what we ordinarily accept as “truth.” The film, the first from Japan to receive wide exposure abroad, had such an impact that the term “Rashomon effect” entered the English language.
Kurosawa had great respect not only for American movies, but also Western classical music. This led him, on occasion, to request of his composers that they emulate certain well-known pieces. In the case of “Rashomon,” Hayazaka was encouraged, during one of the segments, to channel Ravel’s “Bolero.” “Rashomon” was remade as, among other things, “The Outrage,” a middling western starring Paul Newman.
Masura Sato sought out Hayazaka as a teacher on the merits of his music for “Rashomon.” Following his master’s early death from tuberculosis at the age of 41, Sato stepped in to fill the void and became Kurosawa’s new composer of choice. Sato would score eight of Kurosawa’s films (his first, a completion of Hayazaka’s score for “Record of a Living Being”). He too could be called upon to conjure the spirit of Western composers, with the ghost of Verdi hovering over “Throne of Blood,” Haydn and Brahms coloring “Red Beard,” and in the case of “Yojimbo” (1961), Franz Liszt lending attitude to masterless samurai Mifune, who wanders into a remote town and sets about playing two rival families off one another to his own profit.
“Yojimbo” provided the basis for the first of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, “A Fistful of Dollars.” What’s interesting about that is not only Leone’s scene-by-scene reliance on the original, but also Leone’s composer, Ennio Morricone, emulating Sato’s goofy juxtapositions and funky orchestrations. Kurosawa himself was inspired by the western tropes of John Ford movies and the pulp fiction of Dashiell Hammett.
As a bonus, we’ll hear just a little music from one of my least favorite Kurosawa films (beside “Rhapsody in August”), “Dodes’kaden” (1970). “Dodes’kaden” marked a break with Kurosawa’s classic style. For one thing, it was his first film shot in color – truly lurid Technicolor – and the first made after his break with Mifune. The title can be translated, roughly, as “clickety-clack,” the sound of an imaginary trolley car in the fantasy world of a mentally-challenged boy who literally lives in a dump. Though it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film, its commercial failure drove Kurosawa into a deep depression, even to the point of attempted suicide.
For as much as I personally dislike the film, the composer of its soundtrack, Toru Takemitsu is regarded as one of Japan’s most important classical concert composers. Interestingly, like Sato, Takemitsu was a protégé of Kurosawa’s friend and frequent colleague, Fumio Hayazaka.
If your local classical music station is low on local programming, we’ll keep you runnin’ on ronin, in syndication on KWAX, the radio station of the University of Oregon.
See below for streaming information.
Keep in mind, KWAX is on the West Coast, so there’s a three-hour difference for the Trenton-Princeton area. Here are the respective air-times of my recorded shows (with East Coast conversions in parentheses):
PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday on KWAX at 5:00 PACIFIC TIME (8:00 PM EDT)
THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday on KWAX at 4:00 PACIFIC TIME (7:00 PM EDT)
Stream them here!
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