addenda: Britten's film music; "The Fly"; music for dinosaurs

Afterthoughts to recent posts

I can't find my source for the observation on Britten's experience as a film score composer contributing to his prowess in opera scores, but I recall reading this somewhere. (I was checking John Simon's "On Music" collection of essays first.) A first look on the Internet reveals that Britten's score for a 1930s film, "Love From a Stranger," was published recently.

Photos of the Chatelet production of "The Fly" provided me with more entertainment than fireworks over the Independence Day weekend. Amusing and astonishing as they were, they aroused curiosity about Howard Shore's music for the opera. Some comments on the other blogs give positive impressions of Shore's score and the singers' performances.

My reflections on sci-fi as opera brought up what was intended as a humorous suggestion of turning the 1969 movie, "The Valley of Gwangi," into an opera (thanks to a list of familiar operatic elements). If you yearn to watch cowboys wrangling dinosaurs, I beieve Gwangi is the only movie in which you can see that happen (and you'll recognize at least one scene that inspired the special effects people for "Jurassic Park"). Incidentally, Gwangi already has a great score by film composer Jerome Moross. Some of it calls Elmer Bernstein's music for "The Magnificent Seven" to mind. Moross specialized in westerns and wrote the music for "The Big Country" and the old TV series, "Gunsmoke." He was friend, colleague and orchestrator for some other notable film composers, Bernard Hermann among them (as learned from a film music site -- maybe I'll hunt down a link later).