Klarinet Archive - Posting 000629.txt from 1996/12

From: Josias Associates <josassoc@-----.COM>
Subj: Music to Scandinavian Film, "Jerusalem"
Date: Tue, 24 Dec 1996 01:34:41 -0500

As a result of a timely alert by a list subscriber, I saw Robert
Altman's film, "Kansas City," a few months ago and enjoyed the 1930s Kansas
City Jazz background that played throughout the movie. I also got my first
peek at clarinetist/saxophonist Don Byron, although I didn't know it was
Byron until I saw the credits at the end of the film.

I would like to return the favor to the list by alerting
subscribers to the film, "Jerusalem," which has musical content of
considerable interest to clarinetists, and which I was privileged to see
in a pre-release screening by First Look Pictures this week in Los
Angeles. The film was mostly in Swedish (I think that's what I was
hearing) and was produced by a consortium of participants from Sweden,
Norway, Denmark, and Finland.

The film, briefly, tells a complex love story and involves a
charismatic preacher who lures townspeople from a Swedish village in what
I believe are the late 1800s to a Utopian life of religious devotion in
Jerusalem. Their lives in Palestine, however, prove to be anything but
Utopian. The only members of the uniformly excellent cast known to most
American movie-goers are Max von Sydow and Olympia Dukakis. The story is
based on a novel by Nobel Prize winner Selma Lagerlof.

The music for the film was composed by Stefan Nilsson and is
singular for its scoring. A significant portion of the background music
is played by solo woodwinds, alternating between flute, oboe, English
horn, and clarinet. But the lion's share of the solos -- or so it seemed
-- was played by the clarinet. In each case, the solo is unaccompanied,
and in the case of the clarinet solos played against the winter scenes of
ice and snow, the effect is chillingly beautiful. One of the
unaccompanied clarinet solos -- which was daring in my opinion -- was in
the altissimo register and just about took my breath away.

Of the woodwinds, the sound track is kindest to the clarinet and
English horn. The oboe, in spite of its beautiful musical lines, was for
some reason initially difficult to recognize, except that its vibrato
made it distinguishable from the clarinet. (I've not had that problem of
recognition before.)

My knowledge of Scandinavian clarinetists is limited to the
famous Richard Kjelstrup of the Oslo Philharmonic (thanks to Jarle
Brosveet, who attached a name to one of the sounds I have always admired)
and Krister Andersson of the Uppsala Kammarsolister, whose playing of the
Berwald Septet is exceptional. I would be interested to know which
studio orchestra did the film music, and who the clarinetist was. Unlike
Kjelstrup and Andersson, who sound somewhat like the French players of the
50s (Kjelstrup, I am told, studied with Cahuzac), this player sounded like
the Brits of the 50s and 60s -- sort of like Jack Brymer without vibrato.

Apart from the music, which, by itself, is enough to recommend
the film to you, the entire production is superbly crafted. And, although
the story is somewhat on the dark side, when the movie is released, it
should definitely be seen.

Connie

Conrad Josias
La Canada, California