This week on “Picture Perfect,” you’ll be spellbound (I hope) by an hour of musical selections from movies about wizards and sorcerers.
Gandalf and Saruman duke it out in Peter Jackson’s frenetic, yet somehow ponderous adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” films so bloated and poorly paced that anyone who did not read the books probably wondered what all the fuss was about. Its abundant defects didn’t keep the screen trilogy from making over a billion dollars and garnering 30 Academy Award nominations. Three of those were bestowed upon composer Howard Shore. We’ll be sampling from his music to “The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001).
Made for a fraction of the budget, much less self-serious, and arguably way more fun is “The Sword and the Sorcerer” (1982), which holds no pretense to be anything beyond what it is: a schlocky B-movie sword and sandal swashbuckler. However, the composer, David Whitaker, aspired for something greater. Against tremendous time pressures, he turned in a marvelous score, which sounds like Erich Wolfgang Korngold on a shoestring. If this film had been made by George Lucas, Whitaker would be world famous.
After creating one of his greatest scores for Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus,” Alex North had his music for Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” rejected – and not in a nice way. (North didn’t find out about it until the lights went down at the film’s premiere.) Fortunately, the composer was able to salvage the best material for “Dragonslayer” (1981). The plot, about a bumbling sorcerer’s apprentice who faces a seemingly impossible challenge, is serviceable at best, but the dragon may yet be the most amazing committed to film. Also, the score is terrific.
Finally, John Williams kicked off another billion-dollar franchise with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001), which in England was released (as was the book) as “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” Who ever heard of a sorcerer’s stone? I guess the publishers were nervous that Americans would be put off by any association with philosophy.
Prepare to be charmed! It’s music for wizards and sorcerers this week, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, 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 (***now with a repeat Sunday at 9:00 PM EDT/6:00 PM 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/
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PHOTO: Saruman vexes Gandalf with the exquisite whiteness of his beard See less
Tag: J.R.R. Tolkien
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Wizards and Sorcerers on “Picture Perfect”
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Rankin Bass Hobbit Thanksgiving Special Review
The day after Thanksgiving, I think we all know what it is to be as portly and contented as Bilbo Baggins. Yet, inevitably, as we emerge from our tryptophan-induced stupors, there are still the cracked plates and lingering dwarfs to be reckoned with.
Therefore, you’ll excuse us, I hope, as we defer until SUNDAY the pleasure of our discussing the Rankin-Bass adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” (1977). You know, the one featuring the vocal talents of Orson Bean, John Huston, Hans Conried, Otto Preminger, Cyril Ritchard, and Brother Theodore as Gollum. This fondly-remembered television special was first broadcast on Thanksgiving weekend, 44 years ago.
Joining Roy and me on this greatest adventure will be my good friend and Tolkien connoisseur, Paul Miller. When it comes to Middle Earth, don’t even try to guess what he’s got in his “pocketses.”
We’ll be blowing smoke rings and combing out the hair on our feet, for the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Leave your riddles in the comments section, as we livestream on Facebook, THIS SUNDAY EVENING AT 7:00 EST!
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Nordic Enchanters Music After the Super Bowl
By my calculations, the Super Bowl should be over by about 10:00. Just in time for this week’s edition of “The Lost Chord.” Who do you think you’re fooling, anyway? You’re never going to get to sleep tonight, with that belly full of buffalo wings and blue cheese dip. So why don’t you pour yourself a nice, cold glass of water and kick back for an hour of music about Nordic enchanters?
We’ll hear selections from a Finnish film, from 1952, called “The White Reindeer.” 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 white reindeer. 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 score.
Icelandic composer Jón Leifs saw the play “Galdra-Loftr,” by Jóhann Sigurjónsson, in Reykjavik as a teenager in 1915. He determined at once to set it to music, and carried the idea with him for nearly a decade while he acquired the technique to make it so. Loftur Þorsteinsson, a semi-historical character, was kind of a Faustian figure, a student at the Latin school in Hólar in northern Iceland, whose fascination with black magic ended in tragedy. We’ll hear Leif’s “Loftr Suite.”
Finally, Gandalf, a beloved figure from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings,” is said to have been inspired in part by the wizard Väinämöinen from “The Kalevala,” the Finnish national epic. Väinämöinen is familiar to music-lovers, perhaps, from his appearances in the works of Jean Sibelius, especially the symphonic fantasy “Pohjola’s Daughter.”
In 1996, Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen completed his Symphony No. 7, on a commission from the Gothenburg Symphony, which he subtitled “The Dreams of Gandalf.” The origins of the work were in a projected ballet inspired by “The Lord of the Rings.” However, the composer hastens to add that the symphony doesn’t actually depict any of the events in the story, but rather its atmosphere and its poetry.
The music is bound to be more enchanting than the Super Bowl. I hope you’ll join me for these “Blizzard Wizards,” this Sunday night at 10 ET, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
PHOTO: Väinämöinen, inspiration for Gandalf, offers his own alternative to buffalo wings
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