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The Guardian
a day ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Lalo Schifrin obituary
The career of the composer and conductor Lalo Schifrin, who has died aged 93, was incomparably rich and varied, spanning musical genres from jazz and classical to Latin American, funk, rock and avant garde. He conducted (among others) the London Symphony Orchestra, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Moscow Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and composed music ranging from piano concertos and symphonies to an album of songs in the Aztec language for the tenor Plácido Domingo. When the Three Tenors staged their historic inaugural concert on the eve of the football World Cup final in Rome in 1990, it was Schifrin who created the musical arrangements, the first of his four collaborations with them. The recording of the event was declared to be the bestselling classical album of all time. But even if he had done none of this, Schifrin would have become a household name for his work as a composer of film and TV scores. He created a catalogue that places him alongside such renowned names in the field as John Barry, Michel Legrand or Ennio Morricone. His best-known composition was his thrillingly dramatic theme for Mission: Impossible, but he was also responsible for the soundtracks of four of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry films, and supplied musical backings for films starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman. His music for Peter Yates's Bullitt (1968), set in San Francisco, brilliantly fused a tense rhythm track with stark brass interpolations, jazzy electric guitar and hair-raising strings, crystallising the film's aura of mystery and danger. It was a key moment in cementing the legend of its star, Steve McQueen, as the King of Cool. Schifrin, having already written music for the spy series The Man from UNCLE, originally devised the famous Mission: Impossible theme for its TV incarnation, which premiered on the CBS network on 17 September 1966 (coincidentally, this was within days of the launch of both The Monkees and Star Trek). Its throbbing rhythm instantly oozed danger and menace, and Schifrin built the tension with hectic Latin-flavoured percussion, blaring counterpointed brass and a solo flute. Its unusual 5/4 time signature helped to lodge it in the listener's brain. Appropriately for a show about secret agents, the theme's motif of two long beats followed by two short beats spells the letters 'M' and 'I' in Morse code. M:I's producer Bruce Geller subsequently commissioned Schifrin to write the music for his detective series Mannix. When Mission: Impossible was reborn as a film franchise in the 1990s, with Tom Cruise in the lead role of Ethan Hunt, Schifrin's work was part of the package. A dancefloor version of his theme tune by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen from U2, coinciding with the 1996 Mission: Impossible film, reached the Top 10 in the UK and the US, and future film releases would feature reworkings of Schifrin's compositions by composers such as Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe. Schifrin was born in Buenos Aires. His father, Luis, was Jewish and his mother, Clara (nee Ester), a Catholic, and the young Lalo attended services in both faiths. Luis was a violinist and concertmaster with the Buenos Aires Philharmonic at the Teatro Colón. Lalo described Clara, who also came from a musical family, as 'a great mother, a great housewife'. He began playing the piano when he was five, and studied with Enrique Barenboim, father of the conductor and concert pianist Daniel Barenboim. Later he was taught by the Ukrainian pianist Andreas Karalis, and tutored in harmony by the Argentinian composer Juan Carlos Paz. However, in his teens he was dazzled by jazz when he heard records brought in by his classmates at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires. He described hearing Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie as 'like a religious conversion … it was the road to Damascus'. He went on to study law and sociology at the University of Buenos Aires, but at 22 he won a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. After studying with the French composers Olivier Messiaen and Charles Koechlin by day, he played jazz in Paris clubs at night, and also wrote musical arrangements for French record labels. His earnings enabled him to rent his own apartment rather than living in student lodgings. When he returned to Buenos Aires in 1956, he was invited to form a jazz big band for radio and TV work. After he attended a concert at the US embassy by Gillespie and the all-star State Department band, he performed with his own orchestra at a dinner for Gillespie. The latter invited him to come to the US, and by 1958 he had acquired a green card and was living in New York. He composed a suite, Gillespiana, and recorded it with Gillespie's band for the Verve label. According to Schifrin, it sold a million copies. He spent three years as the pianist in Gillespie's ensemble, writing another suite for him, The New Continent (1962). He also became a composer and arranger for Verve, working with artists including Stan Getz and Sarah Vaughan. Verve's parent company was the movie giant MGM, and in 1963 Schifrin, with his wife Donna, moved to Los Angeles to write film scores. He made his Hollywood debut with Rhino! (1964), a drama about endangered white rhinos in Africa. It was the start of an astonishingly prolific career in film and television that would stretch without interruption into the 21st century. Schifrin's music accompanied a string of landmark cinema releases, including the McQueen vehicle The Cincinatti Kid (1965), Cool Hand Luke (with Newman, 1967), Richard Lester's period swashbuckler The Four Musketeers, and the second world war dramas Hell in the Pacific (1968) and The Eagle Has Landed (1976). He added shivering creepiness to The Amityville Horror (1979), and tackled the Redford prison drama Brubaker (1980) and cold war thriller The Fourth Protocol (1987). Schifrin also virtually became Eastwood's personal soundtrack provider. A jazz aficionado himself, Eastwood evidently felt a natural bond with the composer. Their partnership began with Coogan's Bluff (1968), and included Dirty Harry (1971) and three subsequent Dirty Harry instalments, as well as The Beguiled (1971) and Joe Kidd (1972). Don Siegel, director of Dirty Harry, also hired Schifrin for his films Charlie Varrick (1973) and Telefon (1977). In the 1990s, Schifrin began releasing his series of albums under the banner of Jazz Meets the Symphony. These featured orchestral arrangements of pieces by such titans of jazz as Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and his mentor Gillespie, while also essaying jazzified versions of pieces by Mozart, Bach or Puccini. In 1998 he wrote the score for the buddy-cops comedy Rush Hour, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, and the soundtrack album reached No 5 on the US charts. Schifrin also scored the two follow-up films in the Rush Hour series. He composed the score for the horror movie Abominable (2006), directed by his son Ryan Schifrin, and released the recording of it on his own Aleph label. In April 2025, Schifrin's last major work made its debut at the Teatro Colón. This was Long Live Freedom, a 35-minute symphony written with a fellow Argentinian composer, Rod Schejtman, and dedicated to their homeland. Schifrin won five Grammy awards, and was nominated for Oscars on six occasions. In 2018 he was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, presented by Eastwood. In 2008, he published his autobiography, Mission Impossible: My Life in Music. He is survived by his wife, Donna (nee Cockrell), whom he married in 1971, and who managed his business affairs and record label, and their son, Ryan; and by two children, William and Frances, from his first marriage, to Sylvia Schor, which ended in divorce. Lalo (Boris Claudio) Schifrin, composer, musician and conductor, born 21 June 1932; died 26 June 2025
BreakingNews.ie
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- BreakingNews.ie
Mission Impossible theme composer Lalo Schifrin dies aged 93
Lalo Schifrin, the composer who wrote the theme for Mission: Impossible and more than 100 other arrangements for film and television, has died at 93. Schifrin's sons, William and Ryan, confirmed his death. Advertisement The Argentine won four Grammys and was nominated for six Oscars, including five for original score for the movies: Cool Hand Luke; The Fox; Voyage of the Damned; The Amityville Horror; and The Sting II. 'Every movie has its own personality. There are no rules to write music for movies,' Schifrin told the Associated Press in 2018. Lalo Schifrin rehearsing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the premiere of his work Pulsations in 1971 (George Brich/AP) 'The movie dictates what the music will be.' Schifrin also wrote the grand finale musical performance for the World Cup in Italy in 1990, in which the Three Tenors: Placido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti and Jose Carreras; sang together for the first time. Advertisement The work became one of the biggest sellers in the history of classical music. Born Boris Claudio Schifrin to a Jewish family in Buenos Aires, where his father was the concertmaster of the philharmonic orchestra, Schifrin was classically trained in music, in addition to studying law. After studying at the Paris Conservatory, where he learned about harmony and composition from composer Olivier Messiaen, Schifrin returned to Argentina and formed a concert band. Jazz great Dizzy Gillespie heard Schifrin perform and asked him to become his pianist, arranger and composer. Advertisement In 1958, Schifrin moved to the United States where he performed and recorded with famous names including Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Dee Dee Bridgewater and George Benson. He also moved into writing music for television and Hollywood movies. In 2018, he was given an honorary Oscar statuette, which was presented to him by Clint Eastwood. In addition to his sons, he is survived by his daughter, Frances, and wife, Donna. Advertisement
New York Times
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In Just a Few Minutes, This Music Will Change Your Day
Take a few minutes and listen to this piano piece. Paul Lewis, piano (Harmonia Mundi) In 1890, when Johannes Brahms turned 57, he told a friend that his career as a composer was probably over, that he'd done enough. The next year, he wrote his will. But before he died, in 1897, he had a final burst of creativity, including writing four sets of short pieces for solo piano. They contain introverted, quiet, thoughtful music. Brahms called a lot of these little pieces intermezzos — suggesting that he was just having a brief word with the listener between grander statements. This one, though, he called a romance: a tender, intimate song without words. Listen to the whole thing. Then listen to this moment, to the lines in the pianist's two hands — the melody, higher up, in the right hand, and that calm, regular flow of notes in the left: Listen to the second section, which Brahms put in a different key for a different mood — swifter, airier, perhaps a memory of a freer time: Listen to the way that the pianist trills — making a sound that's like quivering — to get from that second section back to the music from the beginning: Do you hear the return of that original music in a new way after the contrasting middle section? With Brahms, at the end of the 19th century, there is often a sense of lateness, or maybe a better word is afterness. His music gives the feeling that he thought he was living and working long beyond the time of true greatness, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert. That gives his music, especially these pieces near his death, an autumnal quality, a sense of things drawing to a close. That doesn't mean they're treacly. (Think of Rembrandt's late, russet-colored self-portraits, ever more unsentimental as they gaze deeply on the aging face.) This romance is wistful but not weepy, deeply emotional but dignified. The music is simple; what it's expressing is not. There is a lot of music that cries. I associate Brahms's music, though, with holding back tears, with not confessing to your ex that you're still in love, with gazing back without lingering, with a stiff upper lip that — like that trill — is ever so slightly quivering.
ABC News
16-06-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
MSO: Forbidden Love
The Romanian-born pianist Alexandra Dariescu brings the teenage Clara Schumann's piano concerto to life in a concert that celebrates some of opera's greatest lovers. Against her patriarchal father's wishes, the brilliant and prodigious pianist Clara Wieck fell in love with the composer Robert Schumann when she was still a teenager and had just composed the piano concerto featured in this unique concert. Her older paramour waxed poetically after the work's 1835 premiere: 'Here white yearning roses and pearly lily calyxes inclined their heads; there orange blossoms and myrtle nodded, while alders and weeping willows spread out their shadows.' Accepting his hand in marriage the following year meant Clara, while continuing to tour as a concert soloist, would have precious little time to write music in between raising eight children (with all but one reaching maturity) and enduring the stormy seas that was her husband's ever-declining metal health. 'I once believed that I possessed creative talent', Clara wrote despairingly, 'but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?' Having established a titular award for an outstanding performance of a work by a female composer at the 2024 Leeds International Piano Competition, Alexandra Dariescu states 'The classical music world has made significant strides in recent years to address the gender balance, but there is still much work to be done.' Hence she delights in giving what is the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra's premiere performance of Schumann's lyrical and suitably brooding Romantic-era concerto. This concert's guest conductor Fabien Gabel, newly-appointed as the Music Director Designate of the Austrian Tonkünstler-Orchester, leads the musicians of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra in music from the opera stage depicting similarly ill-fated yet fictional lovers such as Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde and Claude Debussy's Pelléas and Mélisande. Travelling to Cornwall to marry a king to whom she has been betrothed, Isolde falls for her handsome escort mid-journey, thanks to her servant's love potion, with deadly consequences. Pelléas too pays the ultimate price for his passion of Mélisande, murdered by the cuckolded Golaud. Musically, these works also share the distinction of making great strides both thematically and harmonically, establishing both these composers as revolutionary artists. Recorded live in concert at Hamer Hall, Narrm/Melbourne, on October 5, 2024 by ABC Classic. Producer Duncan Yardley. Sound Engineer Russell Thomson. Program Deborah Cheetham Fraillon: Long time living hereClaude Debussy arr. Alain Altinoglu: Pelléas and Mélisande: SuiteClara Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, Op.7Florence Price: The Goblin and the MosquitoRichard Wagner: Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod Richard Strauss: Die Frau ohne Schatten: Symphonic Fantasy
CTV News
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CTV News
‘It's unreal … a dream come true': Edmonton concert pianist performed at Carnegie Hall
An Edmonton concert pianist still finds it somewhat hard to believe that he had the chance to perform at the famous Carnegie Hall music venue in New York. Emilio De Mercato was born into music in Italy, his mother is a pianist and passed her love of the piano on to her son. De Mercato has performed in many venues, including a number across Alberta since he moved to Edmonton in 2012, but none quite like Carnegie Hall. 'This is a legendary place … so for someone like me, who devoted his life to learning the piano, becoming and pursuing a career as a concert pianist, it was definitely a milestone,' he said 'To be on the stage of one of the most important venues in the world … it can be scary, it can be intimidating.' Emilio De Mercato Emilio De Mercato playing at Carnegie Hall on Friday, May 9, 2025. (Dan Wright Photography) He performed several pieces on May 9 in the Weill Recital Hall, including Après une lecture du Dante and Pictures at an Exhibition. 'I sat at the piano, I started playing, then I was immediately immersed in the music, and there was a great sense of relief and joy because I kind of forgot where I was, I felt at home,' De Mercato said. 'The audience was responsive, warm and loud, so they made me feel great. 'It's unreal … I'm still, sometimes, in a sort of dream, realizing I did it. This was definitely a dream come true.' Like many musicians, De Mercato is often critical of his performances, but said he was 'pretty happy' with this show. 'When you're working at recording, you want to get the perfect product, but the beauty of a live performance is giving life to music at the moment, with the emotions that you feel at the moment, every time is different,' he said. 'It's a compromise, a balance between control of technique, playing the right notes, and at the same time feeling free to convey and deliver emotions and connect with the audience.' Emilio De Mercato Emilio De Mercato playing at Carnegie Hall on Friday, May 9, 2025. (Dan Wright Photography) De Mercato said his favourite moment of the show was the encore after seeing the crowd, which included friends and family who travelled from Italy and Canada to see his performance, give him a standing ovation. 'That was incredible, to receive this honour at Carnegie Hall, it was totally unexpected, and then to perform an encore … I truly enjoyed it.' De Mercato said the concert may be the highlight of his career, but he doesn't plan to stop performing any time soon. 'It's about being satisfied and happy with what you achieved and then trying your best to continue to grow … so we'll see what happens next,' he added. 'I like to think that I can continue to perform anywhere, hopefully at the beautiful stages in Europe and America. I still have many dreams.'
