Film Scores

The appearance Sunday night of the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra at Camden's new $58 million Waterfront Entertainment Centre was a first, but not the only one. It was also part of the first national tour by 35-year-old Keith Lockhart, the orchestra's newly named conductor. He's the 20th since its founding but only the third since 1930, when Arthur Fiedler took over, also at the age of 35, for the next 50 years. An estimated 7,000 to 8,000 music-lovers turned out on the muggy evening, a respectable number if considerably less than the nearly 25,000 who turned out for the Boyz II Men concert at the center last Friday.

For those who came of movie age in the 1950s, the screens seeped with the stuff of which nightmares are made - Creature From the Black Lagoon, Tarantula, It Came From Outer Space. But for the man who scored those and almost 200 other films, it was something more mundane that woke him up nights. "I still have recurring dreams of not making a deadline," said Herman Stein, 85, the Philadelphia-born movie, well - he doesn't like the term - composer. Stein thinks of himself as more of a craftsman, and the perceived difference makes him downplay his contribution to film in the 20th century.

Considering how central-Eurocentric the classical music world still can be, the idea of a regular Philadelphia Orchestra subscription program pairing various mutations of Hispanic and Latino culture would have seemed unworkable a few years ago. What's the repertoire? How is it sequenced? Even now, such a thing could only have been successfully pulled off - and it was - with a guest conductor such as Peru-born Miguel Harth-Bedoya and a nod to tradition with an appearance from dependable Franz Liszt.

Most people's first experience with orchestral music occurs not in a concert hall but in a movie theater. And that first impression can be powerful. That's because good film music - composed and played by masters of the craft - reaches us on a deeply emotional level. Movie music is in the midst of a resurgence powered by VCR owners who have rediscovered some of the great classic scores - and who appreciate the high quality of CD reissues. The thick bi-monthly magazine Fanfare now carries two film score columns.

Several famed classical artists have played on film scores in recent years, the most notable being violinist Itzhak Perlman in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and cellist Yo-Yo Ma in "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. " Add another to the list, as Curtis alumna and superstar violinist Hilary Hahn checks in on M. Night Shyamalan's newest flick, "The Village" (Hollywood). The score, as in all Shyamalan's films to date, is by James Newton Howard, one of the finest of today's film composers.

Of the summer's film scores, the best I've heard have been from family flicks rather than big adventure movies. The finest comes from Thomas Newman, whose score to "Finding Nemo" (Disney) continues a streak of excellent writing most recently heard in "Road to Perdition. " Newman doesn't write melodies as much as he composes exotic fragments. His rhythmic hooks nudge and insinuate, evoking just the perfect underwater moods. For this Pixar fish story, he knew just when to be serious, when to offer a jazzy sound and when to clown.

Yuri Temirkanov led the Philadelphia Orchestra in the final concert of the Mann Music Center's season last night with an aplomb that was roundly appreciated by a better-than-usual crowd at the open-air arena. The program, a good and well-executed one, was an audience pleaser, too: Stravinsky's Suite from L'Oiseau de feu (1919 version) and Prokofiev's Ivan the Terrible, Op. 116. Ivan, composed during the war years, 1942-45, to accompany the Sergei Eisenstein film, was heard in its oratorio arrangement by Abram Stasevich.

Everyone knows LPs are dead, CDs are in. Now, lovers of old films can cash in on the booming market with the recent compact disc releases of previously unearthed classic scores, works for films by a major classical composer, concert music by major cinema writers and a potpourri of tunes by a film music master. The Film Composer's Laboratory of the Sundance Institute, a foundation headed by Robert Redford, has launched a series of newly discovered classic scores on a superbly engineered disc.

I mean no disrespect to Rodney Dangerfield in suggesting that Back to School is a comedy that belongs back on the drawing board. In the climax of the film, Dangerfield clambers up to the platform of a 10- meter diving board. He executes a dive that involves somersaults and pinball bounces off several springboards on the way down. But he can't get Back to School off the ground and, as was the case with Easy Money, this belly-flop of a movie isn't his fault. Even when he's doing a beer commercial with a crowd of aging jocks, Dangerfield stands out. He has only to stare bug-eyed at the camera and start to loosen his collar as if the entire world were threatening to strangle him and the laughter erupts.

Richard Stone, 47, an Emmy Award-winning composer who created context, provided texture and generated laughs with his musical scores for cartoon television shows, died Friday of pancreatic cancer at his home in West Hills, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. Mr. Stone, who was diagnosed with cancer in November 1999, grew up in Rydal and graduated from Abington High School in 1971. He had lived in the Los Angeles area since 1980. An animation composer for Warner Bros., he won seven Emmy Awards, including two daytime Emmy Awards for his theme music for Steven Spielberg Presents Animaniacs and Freakazoid.

NEW YORK - Marvin Hamlisch was blessed with perfect pitch and an infallible ear. "I heard sounds that other children didn't hear," he wrote in his autobiography. He turned that skill into writing and arranging compulsively memorable songs that the world was unable to stop humming - from the mournful "The Way We Were" to the jaunty theme from The Sting. Prolific and seeming without boundaries, Mr. Hamlisch, who died Monday in Los Angeles at 68 after a short illness, composed music for film heroes from James Bond and Woody Allen, for singers such as Liza Minnelli and Aretha Franklin, and high-kicking dancers of the Tony-winning A Chorus Line . "He was a true musical genius, but above all that, he was a beautiful human being.

Marvin Hamlisch, 68, who composed or arranged the scores for dozens of movies, including The Sting and the Broadway smash A Chorus Line , has died in Los Angeles. Hamlisch collapsed and died Monday after a brief illness, his publicist Ken Sunshine said, citing the family. Other details were not released. Hamlisch's career included composing, conducting and arranging music from Broadway to Hollywood, from symphonies to R&B hits. He won every major award in his career, including three Academy Awards, four Emmys, four Grammys, a Tony and three Golden Globes.

NEW YORK - It's been more than a half-century since Christopher Plummer played Henry V - 1956, to be exact. If it's hard to believe that this great (and still very busy) actor is now 81, it was even harder to believe it on Saturday evening as he roamed the stage of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center as the young king, reciting excerpts of Shakespeare's play as the New York Philharmonic performed from the lively William Walton score of the 1944 film. Plummer has been quoted as saying it was this movie, starring Laurence Olivier, that made him take up acting, and it was clear he had a deep relationship with Henry V from the moment he began the familiar prologue: "O, for a Muse of fire, that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention, / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!"

Considering how central-Eurocentric the classical music world still can be, the idea of a regular Philadelphia Orchestra subscription program pairing various mutations of Hispanic and Latino culture would have seemed unworkable a few years ago. What's the repertoire? How is it sequenced? Even now, such a thing could only have been successfully pulled off - and it was - with a guest conductor such as Peru-born Miguel Harth-Bedoya and a nod to tradition with an appearance from dependable Franz Liszt.

Several famed classical artists have played on film scores in recent years, the most notable being violinist Itzhak Perlman in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and cellist Yo-Yo Ma in "Seven Years in Tibet" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. " Add another to the list, as Curtis alumna and superstar violinist Hilary Hahn checks in on M. Night Shyamalan's newest flick, "The Village" (Hollywood). The score, as in all Shyamalan's films to date, is by James Newton Howard, one of the finest of today's film composers.

Of the summer's film scores, the best I've heard have been from family flicks rather than big adventure movies. The finest comes from Thomas Newman, whose score to "Finding Nemo" (Disney) continues a streak of excellent writing most recently heard in "Road to Perdition. " Newman doesn't write melodies as much as he composes exotic fragments. His rhythmic hooks nudge and insinuate, evoking just the perfect underwater moods. For this Pixar fish story, he knew just when to be serious, when to offer a jazzy sound and when to clown.

When a fresh-faced band of Rowan University students showed up at New Jersey State Prison last month toting a video camera, guards were surprised. When they learned what the students were there to do, they were amazed. The group, part of a senior documentary production class, were at the Trenton prison to tape a death-row interview with inmate Robert O. Marshall. "They couldn't believe we had permission to do it," said Jason Kitchen, 22, producer of the half-hour documentary about the Marshall case, which premieres tonight before students and faculty at Rowan.

Richard Stone, 47, an Emmy Award-winning composer who created context, provided texture and generated laughs with his musical scores for cartoon television shows, died Friday of pancreatic cancer at his home in West Hills, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles. Mr. Stone, who was diagnosed with cancer in November 1999, grew up in Rydal and graduated from Abington High School in 1971. He had lived in the Los Angeles area since 1980. An animation composer for Warner Bros., he won seven Emmy Awards, including two daytime Emmy Awards for his theme music for Steven Spielberg Presents Animaniacs and Freakazoid.

For those who came of movie age in the 1950s, the screens seeped with the stuff of which nightmares are made - Creature From the Black Lagoon, Tarantula, It Came From Outer Space. But for the man who scored those and almost 200 other films, it was something more mundane that woke him up nights. "I still have recurring dreams of not making a deadline," said Herman Stein, 85, the Philadelphia-born movie, well - he doesn't like the term - composer. Stein thinks of himself as more of a craftsman, and the perceived difference makes him downplay his contribution to film in the 20th century.

Every spring, the Cannes Film Festival sends journalists scrambling through the Palais screening hall in search of the year's theme. Incest? Working-class angst? The 53d edition, which ended on Sunday, posed no such challenge. Its theme was clearly visible in the preponderance of Asian cinema in every category of the competition. "The Far East is the place to go to find creative filmmaking," festival director Gilles Jacob said emphatically at the start of the 12-day event. "It's no accident that [South]