Present Music Rethinks Beauty And The Beast

Present Music opens its 2022-23 season with French Connection, an exploration of music created for film. The program features a full showing of Jean Cocteau’s classic 1946 film, La Belle et la Bête (aka Beauty and the Beast), with live music from a Philip Glass opera written to fit the film. Selections will also be performed by French crossover sensation Christophe Chassol from his magnum opus, Big Sun.

The concert will be held at the Milwaukee Art Museum (MAM) in Windover Hall, under the Calatrava wings.

The focus on French culture fits MAM’s current exhibition, Always New: The Posters of Jules Chéret, closing on October 16. Known as the father of the poster, Chéret was one of the first artists to bring colorful, large-scale advertisements to Paris streets, creating what critics called a “museum in the open air.”

Cocteau’s version of the Beauty and the Beast story is listed by the British Film Institute in the top 50 films you should see by the age of 14. Reviewing the reissue of the film in 1999, film critic Roger Ebert wrote:

Before Disney’s 1991 film and long before the Beast started signing autographs in Orlando, Jean Cocteau filmed “Beauty and the Beast” in 1946 in France. It is one of the most magical of all films. Before the days of computer effects and modern creature makeup, here is a fantasy alive with trick shots and astonishing effects, giving us a Beast who is lonely like a man and misunderstood like an animal. Cocteau, a poet and surrealist was not making a “children’s film” but was adapting a classic French tale that he felt had a special message after the suffering of World War II: Anyone who has an unhappy childhood may grow up to be a Beast. … Cocteau uses haunting images and bold Freudian symbols to suggest that emotions are at a boil in the subconscious of his characters.

French composer George Auric wrote the original score for the film. His music sets the mood of the film, but does not follow the action in the usual way. Philip Glass chose to replace the entire soundtrack without changing the film. Reviewer Patrick O’Conner describes the unique and challenging contribution of Philip Glass:

What Glass has done is to create a setting of the script for Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film La Belle et la Bete, using every word as it is spoken in the film, but having it sung, the whole thing designed to be performed in concert, with a print of the film being projected silently. Now the words are sung in an ethereal, other-worldly way, and the music trembles with typical Glass motifs.

The Present Music ensemble will play a special arrangement of the opera. Four vocalists take the parts. Two singers, Hai-Ting Chinn and Marie Mascari, have performed the opera often. Jake Stamatis and Robert Mellon join them. The live performance must be timed to fit the film precisely, lip-syncing to the actors on the screen.

The Criterion Collection has issued a blue-ray disc of the film with a version of each soundtrack. The original film may be viewed on YouTube, although without subtitles.

The concert will also include a short excerpt by Chassol, a composer who has taken a truly unique path, which includes writing scores for several movies. He is inspired by sounds around him, especially the human voice. Finding music in the real world, he blends the source with complementary, improvised music influenced by jazz.

Chassol describes his work:

What I’m trying to do is to use the sounds of the images themselves to discover the music of real life. On Big Sun you hear different birds, a singer mimicking the birds, domino games harmonized, an old woman at the market… If I action something in my mind then I can hear music in everything.

Chassol has produced a Triology of films. Writing for Urban Essence, Alex Rennie assesses Chassols work:

When it comes to originality, few are more gifted than Parisian pianist-cum-composer Christophe Chassol. …The crowning piece in Chassol’s trio of sensory trips, Big Sun, dropped this May. Willed by his desire to discover his Antillean roots, Chassol visited Martinique, exploring the country’s electric culture and tropical landscapes. The product of his West Indian voyage is truly mind-blowing, a perfect sonic adventure that encapsulates the isle’s tempo, both aurally and optically. Chassol’s final offering weaves together an opulent tapestry of music that hangs above a seamless stream of improvisational jazz and liquid funk.

Chassol performed the music for Big Sun on piano with additional electronics and a small ensemble. A transcription written for the Present Music Ensemble will be premiered at this concert.

The concert challenges our traditional way of viewing film music. The composer’s contribution reaches higher levels when either Glass or Chassol integrate their work with the moving image.

The concert begins at 7:30 pm, Sunday, September 11, at the Milwaukee Art Museum, 700 N Art Museum Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53202. Tickets may be purchased online. Plan to come early for free admission to MAM before the performance. Music and a cash bar will also be available before the concert.

The Present Music season continues on November 16, also at the Milwaukee Art Museum, with a tribute to William Kentridge. Kentridge, an artist, filmmaker, and producer, is also the subject of an exhibit at The Warehouse. South African composer Philip Miller has been commissioned for a work that tackles the history of apartheid in South Africa.