The Lighter Side of Christopher Young, and the music of Metropolis and IMAX films

Just uploaded are a pair of reviews for two Christopher Young soundtracks: Love Happens (La-La Land Records) has the veteran composer and avid practitioner of musique concrete, avant garde and modern classical techniques writing a romantic drama score (and it works!), whereas Creation (U.K.: Silva Screen, U.S.: Lakeshore Records) is a character study that inspired Young to write one of his best scores in years – light, dreamy, and proof-positive Young is the King of Melancholia.

Also of note to IMAX and soundtrack fans is a fairly new site (www.imaxmusic.net) with a mandate to catalogue and identify IMAX scores and their commercial availability.

Lastly, fans of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis may be aware of the film’s latest round of restoration work after rare footage from a longer print surfaced in Argentina. The attempt to recreate Lang’s original theatrical cut premiered in Germany, and a blurb about the event was reported at DVD Savant (see entry for Jan. 14/10).

More intriguing for fans of the autocratic Lang as well as the film’s original composer, Gottfried Huppertz, are two recordings from 1927 that the Deutsche Kinemathek made available as playable and downloadable MP3 recordings. Seite einz features Lang discussing the film’s music in German, and Seite zwei features a suite of thematic material culled from Huppertz’ score.

While most will find the archival audio fascinating, I’m rather drawn to the striking label art that features a Cubist-styled crooner (or a minimalist design of an unfortunate musician captured in a death pose as a nuclear bomb blew out his eyes, electrified the hair, and extended the lips as the singer saw the dirty cloud, and uttered the sentence ‘Ach, was eine schweinerei!’).

Or something like that.

This blog marks the end of March, as well as the last chance Mother Nature had to smite Toronto with one last snowstorm. However, a final chill on T.O. actually came from the provincial budget which freezes the much-needed public transportation plan for an undetermined period, so I guess we did get hit with one big storm after all.

Brrr…

- MRH