Filmkonzert
28.09.2019
Auditorio de Tenerife, Sala Sinfónica
Dirigent: Diego Navarro.
Mit dem Tenerife Film Choir.
Francis Ford Coppola’s cinematographic retelling of Bram Stoker’s novel became a box office hit in 1992, crowned by three Academy Awards. Its fresh and bold conceptual energy turned the movie into the most influential vampire film in decades. A film whose opulence and sense of spectacle triggered a whole new wave of contemporary horror films. One of the film’s strengths was coming back to Bram Stoker’s original novel instead of adapting the more popular theater play from the 1920s.
Published in 1897, Stoker wrote his novel just when psychoanalysis and cinema were being born. All these overlapping elements encouraged Coppola to create a grand operatic extravaganza inspired by the visual techniques of the silent era. In the tradition of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s FAUST (1926) and Fritz Lang’s METROPOLIS (1927), BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA is perhaps the last jewel of studio filmmaking – and certainly the most deeply European-rooted film ever produced in Hollywood.
Polish composer Wojciech Kilar (1932-2013), one of the most respected European composers of the last decades, was chosen to write the original score. As Coppola did in 1972 when he approached Italian composer Nino Rota to score THE GODFATHER, the surprising choice of Wojciech Kilar would break all musical moulds of the genre.
Belonging to the generation of Krzysztof Penderecki and Henryk Górecki, Kilar’s glorious score dwells between lush romanticism, mysticism and avantgarde. Although Kilar had written dozens of soundtracks for European films before, it is BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA that ensures his position in the pantheon of film music legends. His music turns BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA into a dark, erotic and sumptuous fairy tale, full of deeply human and visceral resonances. In this sense, Kilar’s mastery in choral writing is clear: the chorus appears prominently when Dracula is at full powers (the prologue, the storm sequence) or when he is extremely vulnerable (the final ascension). It is displayed for both damnation and purification.
Both Kilar’s music and Coppola’s images turn the presentation of BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA as a film concert into a full-blooded operatic event for symphony orchestra and chorus.