One of England’s most distinguished concert composers tried his hand at film music for the first time this year, and the result was the charming and period-appropriate music for Keira Knightley in “Colette,” about the turn-of-the-century French novelist.
Thomas Adès is well known in the U.K. for his operas “The Exterminating Angel” and “The Tempest,” as swell as his orchestral piece “Asyla” and his violin concerto “Concentric Paths.” But “Colette,” he tells Variety, “is my first foray into this world. I love film, and I’m fascinated by the art of scoring, so it felt quite natural to do this.”
Adès’ involvement was prompted by an innocent query from his friend, director Wash Westmoreland: “1890s Paris… was that an interesting time for classical music?” His response —that it’s among the two or three most exciting periods in music history, along with a list of 40 key works — led...
Thomas Adès is well known in the U.K. for his operas “The Exterminating Angel” and “The Tempest,” as swell as his orchestral piece “Asyla” and his violin concerto “Concentric Paths.” But “Colette,” he tells Variety, “is my first foray into this world. I love film, and I’m fascinated by the art of scoring, so it felt quite natural to do this.”
Adès’ involvement was prompted by an innocent query from his friend, director Wash Westmoreland: “1890s Paris… was that an interesting time for classical music?” His response —that it’s among the two or three most exciting periods in music history, along with a list of 40 key works — led...
- 11/1/2018
- by Jon Burlingame
- Variety Film + TV
Colette was a pioneer in women’s rights, an author who was nominated for the Nobel prize in literature six years before her death in 1954. But director Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice) — working from a script he wrote with his late husband Richard Glatzer and Rebecca Lenkiewicz — has rightly refused to fashion a stuffy biopic out of Colette’s life. This is the story of Colette’s empowerment, a theme that rings timely and true in the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp. This is the firebrand Colette that Knightley plays with every fiber of her being.
- 9/20/2018
- by Peter Travers
- Rollingstone.com
When you think of costume dramas over the past decade or so, it’s probably a safe bet that you also think of Kiera Knightley. The queen of the costume drama/period piece, she often does her best work while in those sorts of outfits. This week, she adds another one to her cinematic closet, as it were, when Colette opens. In some ways, this is a traditional role for her, while in others, it’s much more modern than you might expect. However you slice it, this is a solid flick with a tremendous performance by Knightley. She’s heads and tails the best part of the movie. Moreover, it’s just her movie. The film is a period piece, of course. The substantial plot synopsis provided by Bleeker Street is as follows: “After marrying a successful Parisian writer known commonly as “Willy” (Dominic West), Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Keira Knightley...
- 9/20/2018
- by Joey Magidson
- Hollywoodnews.com
Dance has been part of the composer’s toolkit since at least the days of the medieval estampie, but in the modern age few have embraced it with the fervor of Thomas Adès, who writes concert music that writhes with rhythm. Adès spent the weekend presiding from the pit and the piano as four choreographers each re-created one of his scores. The production originated at Sadler’s Wells in London, and arrived at City Center courtesy of Lincoln Center’s White Light Festival, where it built to a finale of collective ecstasy usually reserved for cultish rituals and sporting events. It must be alarming for a composer to see musical ideas metamorphose into physical ones. Notes become footfalls, beats are counted off according to an arcane system musicians don’t understand, and painstakingly crafted details slip by unremarked. But there’s a physicality in Adès’s music that lends itself to the stage,...
- 11/23/2015
- by Justin Davidson
- Vulture
If you’d like a glimpse of the future of symphonic music — or if you just want to know what devilish majesty the New York Philharmonic will shortly unleash — this two-year-old YouTube video from the Proms in London is a good place to start. It shows the world premiere of Thomas Adès’s Totentanz (Dance of Death), which the Philharmonic will perform March 12 through 14. Or you could give Andrew Norman’s equally gob-smacking Play a whirl; that piece, too, is from 2013, but the killer world-premiere recording by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project has just come out, and although only a live performance can do this wild score justice, those are still extremely rare.These two not-yet-senior composers — Adès is English and 44, Norman Californian and 35; both overflow with bravado — have double-handedly resurrected the grand symphonic manner that, like the novel and the painting, has died any number...
- 3/4/2015
- by Justin Davidson
- Vulture
Pluralism is the defining feature of music at the end of the 20th century – from the minimalist film music of Michael Nyman to the lush sounds of Toru Takemitsu to the spectralist works that explored sound itself, writes Gillian Moore
"We live in a time not of mainstream but of many streams," John Cage mused as he surveyed the musical scene shortly before his death in 1992, "or even, if you insist upon a river of time, then we have come to the delta, maybe even beyond a delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies … "
The 12th and final episode of The Rest Is Noise festival is called New World Order. It may still be too early to have the historical distance to tell what really mattered in classical music at the end of the 20th century. What is clear, however, is that in the closing decades...
"We live in a time not of mainstream but of many streams," John Cage mused as he surveyed the musical scene shortly before his death in 1992, "or even, if you insist upon a river of time, then we have come to the delta, maybe even beyond a delta to an ocean which is going back to the skies … "
The 12th and final episode of The Rest Is Noise festival is called New World Order. It may still be too early to have the historical distance to tell what really mattered in classical music at the end of the 20th century. What is clear, however, is that in the closing decades...
- 12/4/2013
- by Gillian Moore
- The Guardian - Film News
The Emmy® and Peabody award-winning “The Met: Live in HD” series is concluding it’s seventh season. Featuring 12 live operas from the Metropolitan Opera’s over the 2012-13 season, the final one is the broadcast of Handel’s Giulio Cesare. It will be presented live for only one day on Saturday, April 27, 2013 at 11:00 Am Et in the St. Louis area.
Wamg invites you to enter to win tickets to see Handel’s Giulio Cesare. We have one pair of tickets – Good For Two – to this event. Tickets are good at the AMC Chesterfield 14 and will be mailed.
To Qualify:
1. You Must Be In The St. Louis Area On Saturday.
2. Send Your Full Name To michelle@wearemoviegeeks.com .
3. Winners Will Be Chosen Through A Random Drawing Of Qualifying Contestants. No Purchase Necessary.
Handel’s Giulio Cesare - New Production
Saturday, April 27, 2013 (12:00Pm Et / 9:00Am Pt)
Expected Running Time:...
Wamg invites you to enter to win tickets to see Handel’s Giulio Cesare. We have one pair of tickets – Good For Two – to this event. Tickets are good at the AMC Chesterfield 14 and will be mailed.
To Qualify:
1. You Must Be In The St. Louis Area On Saturday.
2. Send Your Full Name To michelle@wearemoviegeeks.com .
3. Winners Will Be Chosen Through A Random Drawing Of Qualifying Contestants. No Purchase Necessary.
Handel’s Giulio Cesare - New Production
Saturday, April 27, 2013 (12:00Pm Et / 9:00Am Pt)
Expected Running Time:...
- 4/1/2013
- by Movie Geeks
- WeAreMovieGeeks.com
British composer Thomas Adès conducts the Met premiere of his contemporary masterpiece "The Tempest," an English-language opera based on Shakespeare.s final play. The Met.s fantastical new production by Robert Lepage airs on Great Performances at the Met Sunday, March 17 at 12 noon on PBS (check local listings). In New York, Thirteen will premiere the opera on Thursday, March 21 at 9 p.m., with an encore showing Sunday, March 24 at 12:30 p.m. From PBS Simon Keenlyside leads the cast as the exiled magician Prospero, a role he created at the opera.s 2004 world premiere. The opera also stars Isabel Leonard as Prospero.s daughter, Miranda; Alek Shrader as the shipwrecked prince, Ferdinand; Alan Oke as the monstrous island...
- 3/13/2013
- by April Neale
- Monsters and Critics
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