Here is my Wednesday February 23 suntimes.com and Chicago Sun-Times interview with Roger Ebert, a preview of this Friday's (February 25, 2011) Chicago Symphony Orchestra Friday Night at the Movies tribute to Roger.
Roger Ebert reflects on his favorite sounds in a lifetime at the cinema
Friday night Chicago Symphony Orchestra tribute to premier critic, Chicago's won
BY ANDREW PATNER
‘A TRIBUTE TO ROGER EBERT’
Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Richard Kaufman
8 p.m. Friday
Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue
Tickets: $34-$55 -- (312) 294-3000; cso.org
Roger Ebert has always been about 15 or 20 people: film critic, broadcaster, raconteur, bibliophile, prolific author, interviewer, historian, essayist, Anglophile, gourmand, chef, journalist, walking enthusiast, opera buff, Chicagoan, Illinoisan, Illini, prose stylist, Pulitzer Prize winner, sentimentalist, optimist, realist, lecturer, teacher, trivia buff, friend, husband, stepfather, grandparent. And since technologies took off and he has faced health setbacks, he’s added Internet memoirist, television producer (Ebert Presents at the Movies), cookbook author, and Twitterer extraordinaire to his personae.
In addition to the whir of the film projector, Ebert also has had another relatively constant soundtrack running throughout his life. He’s a music enthusiast and a strong proponent of the role that music should play in movies, from the silent age to our own. On Friday night, no less an institution than the Chicago Symphony Orchestra will present A Tribute to Roger Ebert as a part of its popular Friday Night at the Movies series -- a series Ebert has attended under another one of his hats: unabashed fan.
Conductor Richard Kaufman, a specialist in film music and its history, will lead a program including music from such longtime Ebert favorites as Citizen Kane, Casablanca (left), The Third Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Gone With the Wind, as well as works by several other of Ebert’s favorite film composers. The CSO promises some surprises, too.
In an e-mail exchange with Ebert this week, we discussed several aspects of movies and music.
Q. Is the role of music in film a “chicken or the egg” question?
A. Apparently there were scarcely any silent films of any length that weren’t accompanied by some form of music, if only by a piano, violin, or accordion. Purists talk about viewing silent films with no music, but the medium all but cries out for music. Many silent films came with recommended scores, and noted composers wrote for the medium. When sound came along, music was already there.
Q. You’re (understandably!) a longtime fan of Nino Rota, who wrote the music for so many Fellini and Visconti films, as well as Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy. Under Rota's other hat, as a classical composer and teacher, in the ’60s, Rota was the composition professor of CSO music director Riccardo Muti and remained a mentor of Muti’s until his death in 1979. If you had the chance to sit down with Maestro Muti, what would you want to know about Rota?
A. I got a glimpse of Rota only once, on a midnight in the garden under Juliet’s balcony, in Verona, when he hummed his theme music to Franco Zeffirelli and me. He seemed so full of joy. His music for me embodies Fellini above all, and I’ve said, “I could watch a Fellini film on the radio.” I’d ask the maestro what rules Rota urged on his students. I suspect all good teachers have rules, and all good students remember them.
Q. Growing up in Urbana and then at Champaign-Urbana for school, did you or your family have much connection with classical music?
A. It didn’t play much in the home; we listened to the radio network shows. WILL, the University of Illinois station, played a lot of classical music. I went to many concerts at the university’s Smith Music Hall and the Assembly Hall, and even interviewed Harry Partch [the great eccentric American composer and builder of unusual musical instruments, who died in 1974].
Q. One of the last times that we talked in person before your surgeries was at a CSO concert at Orchestra Hall. You’ve also attended the Lyric Opera of Chicago for many years. Are there any favorite performances or particular memories from these companies that stand out for you? Do you recall the first time you heard the CSO live?
A. I don’t recall the first time. There have been many times, though. I found it impractical to subscribe to the CSO because of all of the evening movie screenings I had, and have I probably have heard more concerts overseas -- in London, Paris, Venice and Stockholm -- than in Chicago.
I was fortunate enough to meet [American conductor] Leonard Slatkin. It was in an unusual way: He was a friend of Larry Dieckhaus, our producer at Siskel & Ebert. Slatkin loved movies, and Larry would invite him to screenings and dinners, at which I found him awesomely familiar with the cinema. I was able to attend several of his CSO concerts.
Q. I love that! Slatkin was actually born in Los Angeles and was a Hollywood baby in the ’40s and ’50s. Do you have some fantasy pairings of film directors and composers, or substitutions for scores that you think just don’t work well with the films they accompany?
A. [Martin] Scorsese should have worked with Rota, don’t you think?
Q. Absolutely! You have written movingly on your blog about changes in your life since losing the ability to speak. Have you noticed any changes in the way you listen to music in a film, or to music in general, since then?
A. In the darkest days of my illness, when my attention span was so disturbed I couldn’t focus on television or reading, [my wife] Chaz brought me some speakers for my iPod. Music of all kinds became a lifeline.
--------------
Photo above: Humphrey Bogart and Dooley Wilson in Casablanca (1942). More related film stills here.
Comments