Écoutez le Cinéma NEW CDs

Hello,

below you can find the press release for Écoutez le Cinéma's upcoming four spring releases of film music by Philippe Sarde (two CDs), Maurice Jarre and Michel Legrand. I have updated my personal list of the collection as well: http://ecoutez.urs-lesse.de

Urs
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Ecoutez le Cinéma!, a collection of films remembered in music
May 16th 2011 – 4 new releases

In association with Radio-Classique

Music Box / Philippe Sarde–Costa-Gavras
Also included: La Petite Apocalypse / Additional score for Mad City

In 1989, seven years after Costa-Gavras received the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Missing, this great filmmaker born in Greece began shooting Music Box, his third American film. The story of a Chicago attorney's defence of her own father accused of Nazi war-crimes is a modern tragedy with shades of an Oedipus complex, and Costa-Gavras began a fruitful association with French composer Philippe Sarde, whose scores for Claude Sautet, Bertrand Tavernier and Roman Polanski had created an aura of respect for him. “I liked the idea of a French composer for an American subject with roots in Central Europe," says Costa-Gavras today. Using studios in Budapest and London, Sarde recorded a vast orchestral score enhanced with the timbres and sounds of Hungarian folk-music, represented here by the Muzsikas group, together with traditional folk-dancers who created an unusual rhythm by slapping their leather boots. The reissue of this score is complemented here by another two original soundtracks which Sarde wrote for Costa-Gavras: La Petite apocalypse and especially Mad City, for which the composer wrote several pieces of additional music (never released on record until today) which combine expressions of lyricism and violence like an inner portrait of the John Travolta character in that film. Completed by an absorbing interview with Costa-Gavras, this album adds another layer to Philippe Sarde's edifice at the heart of the Ecoutez le cinéma! collection.

Booklet: interview with Costa-Gavras


El Condor + Villa Rides! / Maurice Jarre

"A few months after my Oscar for Doctor Zhivago, Columbia contacted me to do The Professionals, and I literally fell off my chair. I thought I was too French to get involved in such a typically American genre as the western. To me, succeeding with this score amounted to getting a Hollywood certificate, proof that I belonged; it was a test, like a ragging in college..." Maurice Jarre was talking about his relationship to westerns, a genre which symbolizes American films, and the composer went on to work on eight full-length features. Among them were two pictures with very rare scores: Villa Rides! (never reissued on CD before now) and El Condor (which has never been available on any record). These are sister-scores, and the composer's taste for South-American rhythms bursts through them: lavish orchestrations and a whole range of wild percussion display the full range of Jarre's considerable imagination on his journey through the folk-music of Mexico and The Andes. Following the release of the boxed-set Le Cinéma de Maurice Jarre, this album contains the complete versions of two original soundtracks which, taken together, provide an accurate reflection of the singular rapport tying the composer of Lawrence of Arabia to the western, a genre where he was one of the great innovators. Maurice Jarre aficionados will love this CD, and so will anyone with nostalgic memories of Lee Van Cleef, Charles Bronson or Robert Mitchum on horseback.


Michel Legrand / Cinema Suites
Unreleased opening title from Ready to Wear / The Legend of Simon Conjurer / Sean and Audrey / The Adventures of Don Quixote (suite in four movements) / Ice Station Zebra Suite

The end of 2011 will see the Hamburg Opera's premiere of Liliom, the first ballet-music from the pen of the great Michel Legrand, and only a few weeks away from the celebrations surrounding his eightieth birthday. Hence the idea for this album, Cinema Suites: to put together on one CD several (very) original soundtracks born from images and composed in a form close to concert-music. No rhythm-section, and no soloists, either from jazz or pop music, just the orchestra playing works that are often little-known, if not previously unavailable anywhere: a non-used main title for Robert Altman's Ready to Wear; a sublime suite for orchestra and the harp of Catherine Michel, The Legend of Simon Conjurer, written at the invitation of actor Jon Voight; a shattering symphonic suite in four movements destined for The Adventures of Don Quixote, with Ivry Gitlis' violin giving Cervantes' hero the heart and soul of a Slav… Sparkling with brilliant pieces that demonstrate the orchestral virtuosity of the composer and his infinite sense of lyricism, this Cinema Suites album states the obvious: already famous for pulverising frontiers, Michel Legrand is also a great symphonist.

Booklet: interview with Michel Legrand


The Films of Georges Lautner / Music by Philippe Sarde
Man in the Trunk / Someone is Bleeding / No problem! / The Bottom Line / These Sorcerers are Mad! /My Other Husband / Joyeuses Pâques / The Murdered House

A Prince of dark humour and derision, Georges Lautner is one of the last great masters of French comedy. In the year 2000 the Ecoutez le cinéma! collection opened with the reissue of the music from Flic ou voyou & Le Guignolo before going on to explore the filmmaker's associations with composers Michel Magne (Les Tontons flingueurs, Les Barbouzes) and Bernard Gérard (Ne nous fâchons pas). Today, this new album provides a brilliant, high-fidelity synthesis of his fraternity with composer Philippe Sarde: a musical promenade through eight full-length features, from the wintry thriller Someone is Bleeding (Les Seins de Glace) to some unbridled comedies Man in the Trunk (La Valise), The Bottom Line (On aura tout vu), Joyeuses Pâques, and not forgetting the particular detective-genre (rural bordering on the fantastic) exemplified by The Murdered House (La Maison assassinée), a score that has never been released on record before now. With melancholic waltzes, dry, taut flamencos – and a concertino for flute and orchestra – Sarde enhances the motion-pictures of Lautner with an additional, poetic context featuring performers and soloists such as Phil Woods, Hubert Laws, Marcel Azzola… even singer/actor Serge Reggiani. Complete with previously-unissued items, this Films of Georges Lautner album is presented as a festive celebration, at once droll and tender, in which each track confirms the filmmaker's observation: "With Philippe Sarde, composition above all means imagination."

Booklet: interviews with Georges Lautner & Philippe Sarde


Concept and production: Stéphane Lerouge
Graphic concept: Gilles Guerlet & Jérôme Witz, e-lements
Sound restoration and mastering: Alexis Frenkel, Art et Son

handstand, April 8, 2011; 4:57 PM