Music
Film music is an awkward envelope in which to stuff a huge stretch of modern composition. But so many of the century's composers, of whatever discipline, have written music for films that it's at least as detailed and distinguished a vista as that of music written for the concert hall. Even so, film composers, as a specialist breed, have only recently been handed the kind of plaudits routinely bestowed on their "straight" counterparts. One of them, Eleni Karaindrou, is still little known outside her native Greece. She deserves mention in the same breath as Rota or Morricone, a European whose gentle appropriation of local, traditional sources results in something distinctive but peculiarly timeless, weightless. She tends to make do with a single melodic motif, more a signal than any thematic solid, and then construct a whole score out of it. In her newest soundtrack, Eternity and a Day (on ECM, that most fastidious of labels), it all spins round a nostalgic refrain, permutated through many variations until it seems impossible to get out of the mind.
That is, perhaps, the film composer's raison d'etre, and it certainly suits the work of Karaindrou's closest collaborator, Theo Angelopoulos, who directed Eternity and a Day. Angelopoulos seems the natural heir to Andrei Tarkovsky as the man who makes long, still, serenely anguished movies where gestures and looks become the core of existential dramas. Karaindrou's music for six of his films has been set down on CD, and it is a perplexing body of work, vaporous but naggingly memorable. Just as the film-maker's work requires a sympathy that lets one overlook the longueurs and questionable profundities on show, so does Karaindrou's stately delivery call for some generous judgement.
The danger is that this sort of thing is so wanly beautiful that it strays towards the deceiving platitudes of new age music. Music such as Karaindrou's walks a very thin line between an irreducible simplicity and a substance so wispy that it's barely there at all. Eternity and a Day, as a suite of musical episodes, is archetypal Karaindrou. A single, sustained, humming chord book-ends the music, and keeps recurring like some baleful chorus. A lovely piano tune becomes the wellspring of the rest of the music, piped through oboes and clarinets and given a sprightly folk-dance feel to countermand the general melancholia. Folk art is a hard thing for a cultured composer to create, but she comes very close. Sometimes, she says, she has come up with a leitmotif for a score before Angelopoulos has even put a shooting script together, so closely do they think. Unlike, say, Bernard Herrmann with Hitchcock or Franz Waxman with James Whale, there is nothing schematic about this music going with this film; more plain intuition.
Can the music stand by itself, apart from the film-maker's images? In Angelopoulos's enormous masterwork Ulysses' Gaze, which finally brought him world renown, Karaindrou's forlorn score was like a ghostly folk orchestra playing to a mute audience, much like the Sarajevo band that performs in the mist at the tragic climax to the film. Instead of setting a keynote for the film, it drifted in and out of earshot, adding a textural quality rather than acting as an emotional element. It is a polar opposite to something like James Horner's Titanic score, which seemed designed to jump-start the heart with the enormous bathos beloved of American composers. Karaindrou lets the music sit and wait for the images. Then she asks us to fill in the rest.
Eleni Karaindrou plays the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London (2 February), the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester (3 February) and City Hall, Glasgow (4 February). "Eternity and a Day" is released by ECM on 8 February
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