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Thom & Harold Pinter - La colonna sonora per "Old Times"


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What happens when you let Thom Yorke write your musical

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has written original music for the coming Broadway revival of the play Old Times by Harold Pinter, in what its director calls the combination of “a beautiful piece of theatre and a true rock star.”

Director Douglas Hodge, who won a Tony Award as a drag queen in the 2010 revival of La Cage aux Folles, said Wednesday that Yorke has contributed shards of keyboard-based instrumental music for the beginning and ending of the 90-minute piece, as well as scene transitions.

“The play is a very poetic, free-flowing piece and it needs help in explaining and I think some time the way music fugues and goes back in on itself – the way Thom writes – almost elucidates some of those themes in the play. It just seemed a perfect fit,” Hodge said.

The play about love and memory will be produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company and star Clive Owen, Eve Best and Kelly Reilly. Previews begin Sept. 17 at the American Airlines Theatre.

In Old Times, a married couple welcome the wife’s old friend for a visit, which kicks up old memories, verbal games and classic Pinter amounts of menace. It’s a love triangle about sex, love, jealousy and memory.

“People who love Radiohead might come and get turned on to Pinter. You’ve got two great geniuses there talking to each other about similar themes,” Hodge said. “If I get just a few more people in the theatre who wouldn’t have possibly turned their head to that kind of writing before, it will be a real success.”

Hodge reached out and coaxed Yorke to the project as a huge fan. Yorke fell in love with the play and the two e-mailed, with the director explaining what kind of music he was anticipating and the musician sending “thrilling” compositions.

Because the play is set in 1971, Yorke recorded on synthesizers from 1971 and some of the passages of music are inverted, looped and played backward. Though there is no singing or lyrics, there are shards of songs featuring Yorke’s falsetto. Hodge must now match the pieces of music to his staging.

Yorke follows other prominent musicians to write for Broadway plays, including Vampire Weekend’s Rostam Batmanlij (This Is Our Youth), Branford Marsalis (The Mountaintop), Terence Blanchard (A Streetcar Named Desire) and Alicia Keys (Stick Fly).

Yorke has cemented his place in rock’s pantheon as an inventive progressive with such albums as Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer,Kid A and Amnesiac. He’s also formed the band Atoms For Peace.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/theatre-and-performance/what-happens-when-you-let-thom-yorke-write-your-musical/article25981793/

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Direttamente da Reddit ecco il resoconto di uno che era presente a un'anteprima :

It was Friday night, so mind you it was only the second night of previews. Many things will change between now and the final iteration, but the music likely will not.

The play itelf is, as Clive Owen describes it in a NYTimes interview, "lean" and "economical." It's a single act, a single, beautiful set, and three actors onstage the entire time. Being a Pinter play, it's quite wordy and much of the time unnecessarily so. All of this means that there wasn't much music.

When we entered, before the show, there was a sort of mood-setting ghostly segment that must have been 5-ish minutes or so, which looped until the show began--that's the bit in the Pitchfork preview. It's very beautiful, actually, breathy, gloomy, and with some subtle dark rhythm towards the end. There was one short track that played loudly when the show began, which kind of had an intense, pounding rhythm, sounded like backwards drum beats or something. There was a short track in the middle which consisted of voices, but not articulating anything, so again they were quite ghostly and atmospheric. And the same goes for the short bit at the end of the play. So nothing played while the actors spoke, which was a majority of the 70 minutes. There was, all told, without the background track, maybe a minute and a half of new material, three tracks about 30 seconds each or less.

I apologize that I wasn't able to get a recording. They were explicit about no video or audio recording, and my wife and I were in a fairly conspicuous spot. The sound setup was amazing, many speakers in a much more sophisticated arrangement than you usually see in a Broadway play. All in all I was not impressed with the play, however. It seemed very self-involved and didn't amount to much. It was about a love triangle that comes crashing together in one room, yet I felt the characters learned very little of consequence. I'm not sure why Thom chose to score it, but he did a wonderful job setting a unique tone and keeping the blood flowing between these long set pieces. I kind of see his contribution in the vein of his Twilight: New Moon contribution: definitely him, very minimal, and attached to a curiously artistically misguided, popular project.

I'd still like the tracks for myself, of course!

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sara' che ho sempre adorato Pinter, sara' che mi è sempre piaciuto il fatto che Thom abbia fatto studi letterari ma questo è uno dei progetti che mi entusiasma di piu'. A quanto pare di musica da "sentire" alla fine ce n'e' poca ma è davvero una bella cosa.

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