Montage: Great Film Composers and the Piano (CD review)

Music of Bruce Broughton, Michael Giacchino, Don Davis, Alexandre Desplat, John Williams, and Randy Newman. Gloria Cheng, piano. Harmonia Mundi HMU 907635.

I once remarked to a friend that I thought film composers were writing some of the most-memorable orchestral music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He merely scoffed at the idea. But I don't think we should reject out of hand the work of these folks just because they write primarily for the mass media. That was also the opinion of pianist Gloria Cheng a few years ago when in concert she began playing some of the piano music of famous Hollywood film composers. No, she wasn't playing movie scores; she was playing music specifically written by film composers for concert piano. Apparently, audiences greeted these concerts with overwhelming enthusiasm, and now Ms. Cheng gives us an album of such music, Montage, all of it written within the past few years, and most of it expressly for Ms. Cheng to play.

In the event you need a little background on Ms. Cheng, she won the Grammy award in 2009 for Best Instrumental Soloist Performance and in 2014 for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. She holds degrees from Stanford University, UCLA, and the University of Southern California, and she served as Regents Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

Now, here's the thing: Despite Ms. Cheng's best efforts, these concert piano pieces probably will not remain in the public consciousness for as long as the composers' film scores do. It's just the nature of the game. Fifty or a hundred years from now, audiences will still be enjoying the movies these composers wrote for--watching the films at home, in retrospectives, or listening to albums of classic film music--while audiences may only run into the piano pieces at the very occasional live performance. The music business, like so much of life, has never been fair.

Anyway, first up on Ms. Cheng's program is Five Pieces for Piano by Bruce Broughton (Silverado, Tombstone, Young Sherlock Holmes), a five-movement suite Mr. Broughton presented to Ms. Cheng in 2010. Broughton alternates fast, flowing movements with slower, more languid ones and a set of variations in the middle. Ms. Cheng plays all of it with a good deal of bravura finger work combined with a sweet sensitivity. This may not be great music, but Ms. Cheng treats it as such.

Next up is Composition 430 (2013) by Michael Giacchino (Up, Lost, Ratatouille). Mr. Giacchino tells us it's "the reflection of a memory I have from a particular moment in time while growing up in New Jersey. I remember the feeling of freedom I had while riding my bike around the neighborhood and the sense of self that it brought me." Giacchino's music is sweetly nostalgic, becoming more outwardly expressive as it goes along, and Ms. Cheng carries it off with a fine sense of sentiment without being sentimental. At around six minutes, it's also about the right length to maintain this mood.

After that is Surface Tension (2013) by Don Davis (The Matrix, Beauty and the Beast). Mr. Davis tells us the music "explores the tension created by the juxtaposition of sound/time surfaces as expressed by the metaphor of a well-integrated visual object in which curvature changes systematically." I confess I know next to nothing about modern music, and while I admired Davis's use of tension and release and differing tempos and rhythms, the overall effect did not really impress me much. I enjoyed Ms. Cheng's handing of it and cannot imagine it better played, technically or intellectually; and I liked her handling of the softer middle section best because it was the only part I could much understand.

Gloria Cheng

Then, there is L'Etreinte ("The Embrace") from Trois Etudes by Alexandre Desplat (Argo, The King's Speech, The Grand Budapest Hotel), which Mr. Desplat says "are dedicated to Solre, who is my concertmaster, my artistic director, and also my wife." Lang Lang premiered them in 2012. Desplat's piece may remind some listeners of Debussy with its dreamy lyricism, and that's a compliment. Ms. Cheng approaches its delicate tone in a lovely, subtle fashion.

Following Desplat's L'Etreinte is Conversations (2012) by John Williams (Star Wars, E.T., Close Encounters, Indiana Jones). Mr. Williams explains that it represents a conversation "between the great jazz pianist Phineas Newborn, Jr. and Elizabeth Freeman, known as Mumbett, a resident of western Massachusetts and a former slave who sued the state of Massachusetts in 1781 for her freedom...and she won!" The Williams piece is the longest work on the program, as perhaps befits his stature as a leading composer of our day. His "conversations" take us through several musical genres, most of it quiet and meditative, which Ms. Cheng negotiates nicely.

The program concludes with Family Album: Homage to Alfred, Emil and Lionel Newman (2013) by Randy Newman (Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., Cars), written at Ms. Cheng's request. As we might expect, Newman's music is light, joyful, tuneful, often playful, and almost old-fashioned compared to some of the other pieces on the album. It's also delightfully accessible as it takes us through several musical eras with various references to familiar tunes of the day. If I had to put money on the lasting power of any of the music on this disc, I'd put it on Newman's material, not because it's any better than the rest but because, as I say, it's so listener friendly. Ms. Cheng handles it with loving care.

Producer Judith Sherman and engineer Ben Maas of Fifth Circle Audio recorded the music at Zipper Hall, The Colburn School, Los Angeles, California in April 2014. The piano sounds a trifle close, but there is a fine sense of room ambience around it, the notes displaying a pleasant bloom and resonance. Clarity, too, is quite good, without ever sounding bright or hard.

JJP

To listen to a brief excerpt from this album, click here: