Film and 3D Video in ENO's Sunken Garden

English National Opera's Sunken Garden is a collaboration between Cloud Atlas writer David Mitchell and the composer Michael Van der Aa. Given that the major film of Mitchell's most celebrated novel is currently on general release one might be forgiven for finding a wealth of cinematic reference in the production. Yet the associated digital production design uses the material and method of contemporary cinema in a way that is becoming familiar at ENO. For this experimental, boundary-testing approach the company deserves such work to be seen and heard. Certainly the reported attendance of not only the Wachowski brothers (who co-directed Cloud Atlas) but also some of Hollywood's most familiar stars would confirm its cinematic appeal.

The plot concerns a video installation artist, Toby, who chances across a missing-person trail in the course of his work. He is led to a door in a flyover construction (conflagrating ideas familiar from Being John Malkovich) which brings him to the eponymous Sunken Garden, where he finds the missing individuals, Simon and Amber, trapped as if in digitised stasis. Confrontations ensue, with the couple locked in the Garden finally released at some cost to Toby.

Though the use of video extracts, here projected directly onto the set, is not new in 21st century opera productions, the use of 3D to construct the Garden on stage is a genuinely novelty. Unlike the (reasonable) charge brought against much commercial 3D cinema - that the story and its rendition were being staged for the benefit of the effects - the 3D here gives further articulation to the situation and idea that Mitchell is trying to communicate.

Simon and Amber are not trapped on the other side of a partition. Clearly they are meant to exist, as Toby's initial attempt at interaction demonstrates, albeit it in a different metaphysical construct. The 3D allows this to happen on the stage, with the exotic environment (the Garden was filmed on location at the Eden Project) perceived to be coming out over the orchestra pit.

This is not to say that the fourth wall is broken. Though the production cannot resist indulging a little of the entertaining gimmickry familiar from cinema - splashing water hurtling into the auditorium, essentially for its own sake - the possibilities for interaction remain on the stage. A causal link between the film and the live action - i.e. assisting in suspension of disbelief - is helped as the characters reel sheer scrims of material across the stage as the same unspools in the projected film.

The cinema references are fascinating. In addition to the tragi-comic possibilities of exisiting inside John Malkovich's body one also can't help but recall the visual-texture manipulation of Predator. In John McTiernan's 1987 action thriller, a malevolent alien moves across a jungle backdrop, concealed by a digitised cloak of invisibility but shown on screen, cleverly, by the distended texture of the picture - like a mouse running under a flat sheet. This is directly analogous (if not metaphysically identical) to the technique in Sunken Garden, as the sense of action within the diegesis is clear but the fourth wall is not broached.

A cinematic reference that is intended is that of the moral turbulence of Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris, as Michael Van der Aa chooses to incorporate the same extract of Bach as Tarkovsky in his 1973 film. Both film and opera present alternative realities, requiring the protagonist to decide to which reality they want to adhere.

Additionally, and certainly by coincidence, the data-moshed appearance of the production's projections is a s mysterious and even threatening as the new teaser trailer for Man Of Steel, in which General Zod appears - apparently from an alien dimension - to threaten Earth. Ironically, we recall that in the original film Superman 2, Zod was sentenced to be trapped inside a mirror, putting him behind the 2D plane of a sheet of glass, something that this production's immaculately rendered 3D projections successfully circumnavigate.

Music in Stoker

There's a wide range of music in Chan-wook Park's Stoker. A psychological thriller that mixes up possible and actual memory, the music also regularly hops across the diegesis. This is partly an effect that works in tandem with the rich and carefully prepared sound design, as much a character in this stylised film as any visual sleight of hand.

The music itself made its impresion on me in three ways. Firstly, we hear an opera, both on the radio and non-diegetically. Verdi's Il Trovatore is a somewhat classic opera plot in which familial passions and a crucial obfuscation of the facts leads to murder. This is (not to spoil it) not too far from the main themes of Stoker, though Chan-wook's film is rather more surreal and pathologically curdled than the more straightforward red-mistiness of the opera. This is the extract from the film, Viorica Cortez singing Stride la Vampa... an aria of vengeance for a murdered parent:



More interesting is the music played at the piano. This/ese duet scenes use the music of Philip Glass, apparently specially written pieces for the film. Rather like the similar scenes in Jane Campion's The Piano of twenty years ago this Gothic-styled, eroticised set-piece involves fairly simple music that builds in intensity (if not complexity). Here's Michael Nyman's original, of 1993 - compare it with Glass' Stoker piano work.



Finally - and the bit I haven't quite thought through (!) - is the use of whistling. I think that people use whistling as a displacement activity, to take their mind of tedium (usually) and I suspect that the use of whistling indicates subplot, whether actual or psychological.

David Buckley

This coming week sees the release of a new pulpy action thriller vehicle for Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez, Parker.



The music for this romp is written by a young British composer with a steady career in Tinseltown at the moment, David Buckley. Crossing the pond six years ago to assist his colleague Harry Gregson-Williams he has gone on to score a number of films in his own right, many in this action thriller genre; they include The Forbidden Kingdom, From Paris With Love and director of the moment Ben Affleck's second feature The Town. David Buckley also writes the music for the American legal drama The Good Wife.

I spoke to David by phone earlier in the year about writing for genre, Affleck's ear for music and the influence of Tony Scott, as well as Parker. The interview is to be broadcast tomorrow night (4 March) at about 2130 GMT on The Kevin Markwick Show, online at http://www.uckfieldfm.co.uk/ and shortly afterwards via podcast.

Film's Influence On Opera

An old article from the New York Times is doing the rounds. How Hollywood Films Are Killing Opera refers specifically to Kenneth Lonergan's 2011 post-9/11 masterpiece Margaret but it also has a (pair of) broader point(s) to make:

connecting opera so closely to red-meat emotionalism — melodrama, tears and screaming matches — also betrays a limited, and limiting, understanding of what the art form can be, signaling to its audience that its other aspects are less important... 

... until opera stops being associated with escapist nostalgia and fancy dates, it is doomed to struggle for relevance.

With some noted exceptions where theatre-going is shown as an integrated part of normal life, film tends to show opera and opera-going as special, isolated, one-off. In addition to the examples of the piece - Moonstruck and Pretty Woman - one might also think of the third Godfather film with its socially gilded performance of Cavalleria Rusticana that reflects the dramatic climax of that film, or perhaps Birth in which a society couple attend a Met performance of Die Walküre.



At least the opera is integrated into the drama at hand in either case. The point of the article is to bemoan the distillation of the operatic experience being poured into a film, or 'going to the opera' being used as a trope to connote social standing or education - for example in Hannibal (the sequel to The Silence of The Lambs) in which the titular psychopath is meant to be a cultured man and so is shown to be attending an opera. The actual 'opera' is of no consequence and Hans Zimmer wrote one of his least effective pastiche works to fill the gap. The problem is that the film's audience, many of whom will not have experienced opera before, then come away from the film making assumptions about opera and opera-going: in this case that the music is oleaginous, stagings confined to 17th century re-creation and that the audience wears dinner outfits and sits too close to flaming saucers of oil in the aisle.

There have been even more recent examples with First Night, a British farce set in a country house putting on a production of Cosi Fan Tutti - for all it's turning opera inside out it still couldn't part with the rural glamour one associates with Glyndebourne, Garsington, Grange Park or Iford. Quartet, about retired operatic singers is more successful as it focuses on the characters of its own drama - opera is discussed as if in another room (it is in another lifetime) and the benefit concert is seen as a novelty, not a re-creation of another operatic performance.

The fact is that it suits those who sell - be it film or other merchandise - to have opera kettled as a symbol of something on the periphery of the consumer's understanding. For the filmmaker, it becomes an easy form of reference, for the promoter, shorthand for glamour and exclusivity. Probably the most successful live musician today is Andre Rieu whose recordings and shows sell in huge numbers precisely because of this impression of conferred glamour. The performers are dressed up in pastiche 19th century costume and operatic arias deconstructed to play to the arena format of the performances. The pageantry of the shows give the impression of the 'special' in place of the involvement of real drama or the wonder of high calibre acoustic music making.

Of course, the final point to make is that film-making is opera. Both are conflagrations of disciplines in a single production. Opera is simply three dimensional and acoustic - and, as it is confined to a single limited space it is much more expensive (in the final reckoning) to put on. It's this expense, an honest fact, that perhaps even the most sympathetic film maker cannot help to reflect when inserted into their own production.

Django Unchained - Music Notes

Naturally, a new Tarantino movie is going to have a noteworthy soundtrack. It's all readily accessible online and I recommend having a listen.

However, one track halfway through the picture grabbed my attention and demanded that I watch through the credits to find out what it was. The titles rolled fast; there was a lot of Ennio Morricone and a splash of Jerry Goldsmith flashing before my eyes. Where was that almost Bartok-like sound I'd heard, or perhaps even beyond-its-limits Bernard Herman? No. This was the music of Luis Bacalov.



Once we're past that extraordinary, febrile string scuttling, a tune breaks out. It's remarkable - it almost sounds as if it's been borrowed from Howard Shore's Lord Of The Rings score. But then, the latter two LotR films are nothing if not last stand at the OK Corral-type yarns. No, Bacalov has been writing music since the 1950s and this track is almost certainly borrowed from a 1960s spaghetti western, possibly even the original Django movie of 1966, for which Bacalov was the composer as he was for a number of spaghetti westerns.

The main title song is also the work of Bacalov, sung by Rocky Roberts.

Incidentally, Christoph Waltz's character, Schultz, tells the harpist to 'stop playing Beethoven' at a latter point in the movie. She is playing Für Elise, a bagatelle or short composition intended for piano. And yes, it is as irritating as Schultz suggests.

Quartet: Musicians On Film

One of the more popular films of the new year has been Quartet, a story set in a retirement home for former musical professionals. As is always the way, a lot of the interest in the film is as much to do with it being the directorial debut of actor Dustin Hoffman, as well as the fine eponymous quartet of actors: Maggie Smith; Tom Courtenay; Pauline Collins (a revelation); and Billy Connolly. Based on the extraordinary documentary Tosca's Kiss, concerning Casa Verdi, a real-life retirement home for opera singers, Quartet centres on what can be a misunderstood and marginal part of the music industry, though it also takes in retired instrumental performers, as well as those from related theatrical disciplines.

Sensibly, the film is more about the relationships that make up the quartet. It also addresses how the step into retirement changes the relationships from the former, younger, active part of life, as well as broader issues of pride, dementia and physical health. The music part is really just a vehicle and with his broad cast Hoffman wisely allows the film to talk in general terms about performing rather than music - or singing.

Nonetheless, singing there is. Whilst the few professionals among us might be interested to see the film with a view to learning more about the decline in technique and ability and how that affects a singer physically and mentally, the film steers admirably clear of such detail. This prevents the film from becoming bogged down and equally navigates the (literally) treacherous path of misrepresenting singers with dramatically amplified or narratively condensed versions of the art for an audience expecting to be out of the cinema in 90mins.

Instead there is the welcome sight of seeing a number of real music professionals populating the second tier of the cast, seasoning the conventional, ersatz patina of the drama with the real thing. Gwyneth Jones, a true superstar of the actual operatic stage, reprises this role with just enough twinkle to suggest it's acting. John Rawnsley and Nuala Willis, very much the real thing occupy the screen with a charisma (and voice) that cannot be contrived. They are clearly enjoying themselves. Most interesting though are the figures behind the foreground of the professional musical landscape. There's a former string quartet, orchestral players and a pair of accompanists who perform in the film as they might do on the rehearsal floor of a high-intensity opera studio; alert, inscrutable, hardened. Their performing-with-instruments and behaviour can no more be learnt by actors as it can be imagined. Hoffman's inclination to include the real thing is invaluable.

During the closing credits Hoffman chooses to honour his cast by showing old photos and giving details of the significant parts of the their careers. This has the effect of levelling the cast which is less about moving the spotlight to the less high-profile to showing how even the most high-profile or 'name' performers have worked with a comparable tenacity. If one can get over the necessary-but-toe-curling cut-n-shut jobs on Verdi's Brindisi and the inevitable, hackneyed inter-generational discussion comparing opera and hip hop (not to mention Hoffman's rather picaresque approach to the film overall) then it's well worth investigating.

Music in Amour (2012)

Michael Haneke's Palme d'Or award-winning film Amour concerns a pair of music teachers. As their relationship is put under the inevitable pragmatic strain brought with old age so the purpose of that music in their life is one of a number of facets put under scrutiny.

The opening of the film (with a trademark Haneke wide shot, inviting the audience to scrutinise the frame, in the same way that one is invited to scrutinise the film's content in general) sees the couple in the Théâtre des Champs Elysées at a piano recital, where a former pupil plays the Schubert Impromputu Op. 90, No. 1



Repeated when the pupil visits the couple at their home, the music has the dramatic trajectory of the film itself. A violent single note across gives way to a single, frail, sad melodic line for subsequent development.

(Additionally, to make a vaguely musicological suggestion for a moment: the opening note is a G in octaves, and the subsequent impromptu proper is in C minor. As G is the dominant of C - that is to say the note that, in musical semantics, poses the question that the C answers - it may be said that, if the music is an anology for the film, then its story is the consequence of the simple, catastrophic opening statement. This would appear to be the case.)

Later, the stricken wife Anne (Emanuelle Riva), is seen to play another Schubert Impromptu, the Op. 90 No. 3. This is a different sort of piece. Lyric and pastoral, it is all but a song without a singer and recalls the Romantic landscape paintings which occupy the lovely yet oblique central sequence of the film. Haneke's conceit for inserting Anne's playing of this piece in the film is also typical of his assurance in skipping across the metaphysical strata of his story.



Finally, there is the matter of J.S. Bach's Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ BWV 639, as played by Georges half-and-heavy-heartedly early on in the film. This is sacred music in cinema, the chorale prelude heard insistently throughout Tarkovsky's own great meditation on love and loss in Solaris (1972). Here it is played in Busoni's arrangement for piano.



Like all the other music in the film the character's performance of the music is cut off, with either the musician giving up or a CD player being stopped; i.e. the music stops due to the action of a character rather than through the natural causal logic of a narrative edit. The coldness of this act, its stark brutality, is temperamentally aligned with the rest of the film. It is also typical of Haneke's delight in messing with the expectations of an audience muddying narrative trajectory, diegesis and metaphysical possibility to illuminate rather than obfuscate his point.

The Master's Music of a Former Life

As in Paul Thomas Anderson's previous film There Will Be Blood, The Master uses a soundtrack that is two-thirds new music by Jonny Greenwood with a significant sprinkling of familiar recordings.

The jazz songs used on the soundtrack are directly contemporaneous with the film, set in post-war America. Interestingly though, Anderson chooses tracks that also reference older work, both in melody and text.

For example, the song Get Thee Behind Me Satan (by Irving Berlin) performed by Ella Fitzgerald is based on the biblical text concerning Jesus' temptation in the wilderness.



Of course, it's also the case that the subject matter of the song in which Jesus wrestles with a malign omnipotence could hardly be closer to the dark heart of the film.

Later, Anderson uses a recording of Jo Stafford singing No Other Love, which itself is a reworking of Chopin's Op. 10 Etude No. 3.



The point is that the charismatic principal character Lancaster Dodd makes outrageous claims about the former lives of humans, so it seems appropriate to have music and text that is re-worked in a new contemporary incarnation.

This isn't exclusive to the period popular music however. Jonny Greenwood's distinct original music also resonates with older influences. The string ensemble that accompanies the oft-recaptiulated shots of the boat's wake shimmers with the neoclassical colours of Stravinsky's (pre-war ballet, published in the same year as Berlin's song) Apollo, music designed to capture the climate and vista of Mediterranean antiquity.



Indeed, I remember well the 2009 BBC Prom in which Jonny Greenwood's striking (if slight) piece Popcorn Superhet Receiver was played alongside Stravinsky's ballet.

Paul Thomas Anderson's film is about the power-struggles and cultural trajectory of a modernising America. It is, at the same time, a film about the rather more perennial drama of personal conflict and how we define ourselves. Choices of music that bear the manifest imprint of previous works of art carry that influence on their surface and consolidate the issue that Anderson is essaying in his film.