Composer Carlos Escalante Macaya

FRANKENSTEIN THRILLS IN UNIQUE SO CO PHIL CONCERT IN JACKSON THEATER

The Sonoma County Philharmonic’s concerts of October 26 and 27 featured a somewhat unorthodox Halloween-adjacent theme of just two works: Rachmaninoff’s 1909 symphonic poem Isle of the Dead and a new score by contemporary Costa Rican composer Carlos Escalante Macaya for the 1931 Universal Pictures classic movie Frankenstein. Both concerts are reviewed here.

The stage arrangement at the Jackson Theater, So Co Phil’s customary venue, was modified to allow the complete film to be screened “in glorious black and white” above the orchestra during the performance.
Rachmaninoff had been searching for a theme for a symphonic tone poem during the early 1900s and found inspiration in a print of “Die Toteninsel” (“The Isle of the Dead”), an 1880s painting by Swiss symbolist Arnold Böcklin. The picture of a shrouded figure being rowed toward a gloomy islet with tombs and cypress trees was so popular that Böcklin himself produced no fewer than five versions of it, and black and white lithograph prints of it were distributed all over Europe. In keeping with this, the piece opens (and in large part continues) in quintuple 5/8 time, evoking the “pull, pause; pull, pause” rhythm of rowing.

The quiet opening gradually builds to a triumphal climax in 3/4 time, during which the brass tended to overshadow the normally lush string writing so characteristic of Rachmaninoff. This was due not to any lack of effort on the part of the upper strings, led by concertmaster Pam Otsuka, but simply to their limited number—so much so that some basses and cellos, including this writer, didn’t participate in this particular concert in the interest of better string balance. However this allowed me to attend the dress rehearsal, following the scores for both works, to get a better idea of the overall structure of the pieces.

The composer’s fascination with liturgical music, particularly the plainsong chant dies irae (the Day of Wrath) is well known, and it appeared here (as well as in at least 12 of his other works) both in its original form and in a descending progression of minor and major seconds that he’d recycle in his Symphonic Dances some 30 years later. Conductor Norman Gamboa and the orchestra gave a relaxed, polished, 24 minute performance of the work, such that a long moment of silence followed the quiet ending before the beginning of applause.

The concept of music to accompany films is hardly new, as the great movie palaces of the 1920s had pit orchestras of varying size, while small local theaters had to make do with a single pianist. The pit orchestras of silent films were later replaced by remarkable theater organs with far more stops and textures than the largest church instruments; the “Mighty Wurlitzers” and their performers often were attractions in their own right. Sometimes these artists had to make up their own accompaniments to films, but studios provided musical “cue sheets” with selections to be played along with specific scenes on the screen.

With the advent of synchronized sound in the late 1920s (“the talkies”), studios at first felt that musical accompaniment might actually distract from the story, not to mention composing, performance and recording would all have been significant costs. Thus, Universal’s two 1931 horror blockbusters, “Dracula” and ”Frankenstein,” were essentially devoid of music, apart from a few moments of Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Schubert in the former and an ersatz-Bavarian Schuhplättler for the dancing peasants in the latter.

Composer Escalante Macaya, who was present and received standing ovations at both performances, chose to emulate the “cue sheet” formula with self-contained musical accompaniments for many of the action sequences while often allowing gaps for much of the dialogue. (And a good thing, too: while the opening credits touted the then-new “Western Electric Noiseless” sound recording technology, it wasn’t, and many in the audience were grateful for the supertitles accompanying the distinctly "Lo-Fi" original sound. The sections of the score were marked as “cues,” beginning with a mysterious prologue and opening reminiscent of a minor version of the eight-note bass line of the Pachelbel Canon in D so loathed by cellists. Fortunately it was repeated only twice, rather than the 54 times of the original, but then transitioning to fortissimo chords appropriate to foreboding castle towers on storm-lashed crags.

No less than 17 further cues followed, of varying length and evoking colors varying from soothing and reassuring, through foreboding, and on to dramatic and tumultuous depending on the action. Taken as a whole the style seemed very reminiscent of the grandiose sweep of the symphonic film scores of the golden age of cinema, rather more so than the excellent, but minimalist, score written by Philip Glass for string quartet in 1998 to accompany Universal’s earlier Dracula.

While the screen actors’ occasional “over the top” emoting (after all, they’d learned their trade in the age of silent films) sometimes evoked audience giggles where in an earlier age they’d have been horrified, it was as much the music as the actual film that held them spellbound for 70-odd minutes, and Escalante Macaya’s directions for the various cues include words like “somehow comedic,” “mysterious,” “very aggressive,” “agitated,” “dramatic,” “martial,” and, for the final credits, “apotheosic.” The writing, while accessible to both musicians and audience, was by no means simplistic; indeed, and possibly as an inside joke, the 14th Cue, for the scene in which the Monster first seems to befriend a little girl, but then throws her into a lake to drown, was noted by the composer as being based on a counterpoint exercise written by Beethoven for his teacher in Vienna, Johann Albrechtsberger.

Overall, the orchestra performed the score with both technical musical excellence and considerable enthusiasm. It was a successful performance and well received by an audience of 350, the largest attendance in recent So Co Phil concerts.