As a follow-up to a recent mfiles report on several film music related concerts and festivals being scheduled around the world, we note yet another related event happening in March 2025 in Washington DC at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater (repeated the next day at the nearby Baltimore Museum of Art Meyerhoff Auditorium). There, conductor Angel Gil-Ordόñez will be leading the PostClassical Ensemble in the group's closing concert of the season to be called "Beyond the Godfather: The Concert Music of Nino Rota."
Giovanni Rota Rinaldi was, of course, the composer behind so many of the Italian director Federico Fellini's greatest films from La Dolce Vita to Otto e Mezzo (8½), from La Strada to Amarcord – films full of bawdiness and sentiment, fantasy and philosophy, dynamic visuals and unforgettable characters – and Rota's music was integral to the playful yet ironic world they created.
Of course, to most people, Nino Rota is best remembered as the composer for The Godfather films of the 1970s and for the 1969 youth-oriented version of Romeo and Juliet (whose famous theme became a hit record for Henry Mancini). But Rota's work on earlier films like the 1956 version of War and Peace or the Visconti film Rocco and His Brothers or Taming of the Shrew relied on more formal composing, using broader strokes, and a more academic, demeanor, more in line with his position as director of the Liceo Musicale conservatory in Bari. Indeed, colleagues there often teased him about being in such a strict academic environment during the week at school and then on the weekends (as it were) composing yet another circus march for a Fellini scene or a mock-commercial tune like "Drink More Milk" for a comedy film like Boccaccio 70. But that was all fine with him: he loved both scenes: the discipline of the classroom and the wild variety offered by screen composing: a symbolic film like Orchestral Rehearsal gave him a theme-and-variations format to play with while 1974's The Abdication offered a more deeply felt and tonally complex palette for chorus and orchestra in the form of a lush, passionate quasi-church threnody. And then, even in the midst of that formal score, he delighted in being able to contribute a tart bassoon theme for the devious dwarf character, Birgitto, by way of contrast.
What the PostClassical Ensemble concert event wants to spotlight, however, is that aspect of Rota's versatility beyond the screen and so they have programmed some of Rota's more extended "pure" works such as his Concerto for Strings from 1965, excerpts from a ballet suite Le Moliere Imaginaire, and Rota's Castel del monte for French horn and orchestra in which Christy Klenke is soloing. Not a single film character in sight during any of this music but the spirit of Rota, colorful and dramatic, confident and elegant, is on display as vividly as ever.
At the very end of Fellini's 8½ we watch as the Everyman hero, Guido assumes the dreamlike role of a circus ringmaster, leading a surrealistic parade of all the characters from his past life we've been watching for the last two hours, now marching in joyous lockstep under his direction around a sawdust ring -- old friends we recognize, past lovers, past villains, childhood pals -- and Guido joyously leading the whole bunch, finally in (at least, symbolic) control after all the chaos. And it's all scored to the tune of one more Nino Rota circus march, amusing in itself but obviously ironic in intent and poignant in effect. And at the very end of this parade, as the broad circus lighting shrinks to a single spotlight, the lone figure of a child is left on stage, marching in place and the music score has likewise reduced to the solo flute he is playing - it is the familiar Rota march on which the whole score has been based, only now diminishing, distancing until the spotlight goes out. This, of course, is meant to represent Guido, the core-child at the heart of the complicated man we've been watching even as Rota's flute theme has been the core of the score. It's also Rota applying a "pure" music idea to a cinematic purpose, as always inspired by both worlds.
"Beyond the Godfather: Concert Music of Nino Rota" debuts in March 2025 and already people are urging Gil-Ordόñez's PostClassical Ensemble to take it on a wider road tour.
John Caps has written on music for High Fidelity/Musical America and the New York City Opera; and on film music for Film Comment, Film International, National Public Radio, The Cue Sheet, and the University of Illinois Press's "Music in American Life" series. His most recent book is Overhearing Film Music: Conversations with Screen Composers from the SUNY Press (State University of New York).
mfiles home