Tribute to Georges Delerue: Classical Music in Films

The Flanders International Film Festival-Ghent each year pays attention to the role of film music. This includes, among other things, film prizes (best film and best music), screenings of silent films with live musical accompaniment, seminars on film music and concerts of film music.

On October 7th 1994, the festival organizes a concert of film music, presenting an anthology of classic themes as used in film and a tribute to the late Georges Delerue. The Nieuw Vlaams Symfonieorkest will be conducted by Flemish conductor Dirk Brossé. Solists are Daniël Blumenthal and Yair Benaim.

The concert will take place at the Flemish Opera House Ghent and will be captured for radio broadcast on October 30th and November 13th.

The first part of the concert will be a tribute to the late Georges Delerue, who died in 1992 and who was a film composer of international renown. He launched his career at the times of the French Nouvelle Vague. His works included ballets, opera, chamber music, orchestral pieces, vocal compositions and, of course, music for television and film.

During the fifties, Georges Delerue scored more than 20 short films, among which documentaries by Alain Resnais. His first feature length film was Pierre Kast's Le Bel Age (1959) and some of his "Nouvelle Vague" scores are still famous, notably Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Jules et Jim (1961) and Le Mépris (1963). Delerues first American film was John Huston's A Walk with Love and Death (1969). Highlights in his career are A Man for all Seasons (1966), Women in Love (1969), Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Julia (1977). In 1979 he received the Academy Award for Best Original Score for A Little Romance. His scores for Agnes of God, True Confessions and Platoon have become classics. Georges Delerue was the Flanders International Film Festival-Ghent's guest on three occasions. He performed his score for the silent classic Casanova in Ghent in 1988.

Delerue's particular talent for musically interpreting the characters and general atmosphere of a film have made him one of the world's prominent composers of contemporary film music. Among the filmmakers with whom Georges Delerue had a lasting relationship were François Truffaut (e.g. Tirez sur le pianiste 1962, La Nuit Américaine 1973 and Le Dernier Métro 1980) and Philippe de Broca (Cartouche 1964, L'Homme de Rio 1964 and Le Roi des Coeurs 1966, are amongst the 16 de Broca films for which he wrote a score).

Part I of the programme features:

- Hommage à François Truffaut (Suite of themes for François Truffaut films)
- Première Suite Cinématographique (a suite of some of his best known themes)
- Concerto de L'Adieu (from the film Dien Bien Phu (1992), one of the last films to be scored by Georges Delerue)

Part II of the concert will be dedicated to music by classical masters, whose compositions were applied in well-known films, which in turn gave the music a sometimes unexpected popularity:

- La Forza del Destino - ouverture (Verdi) (from E La Nave Va - Federico Fellini 1984)
- Adagio for strings (Barber) (from The Elephant Man - David Lynch 1980 & Platoon - Oliver Stone 1986)
- La Gazza Ladra (The Stealing Mag-Pie) - ouverture (Rossini) (from A Clockwork Orange - Stanley Kubrick 1971)
- Concerto for Keyboards and Orchestra KV 467 (nr 21) (Mozart) (from Elvira Madigan- Bo Widerberg 1967)
- Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin) (from Manhattan - Woody Allen, 1979)