About the Concert

Thursday, April 19, 2001
8:30 pm, Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater

 
David Raksin: Hollywood Cabaret

Music from the films Laura & The Bad and The Beautiful plus Swing Low, Sweet Clarinet & Raksin’s reminiscences about the Hollywood heyday.

David Raksin, piano & vocals; Francis Thorne, piano & vocals; Derek Bermel, clarinet; Eva Gruesser, violin; Robert Chausow, violin; Ah Ling Neu, viola; Eugene Moye, cello

Tickets $20
at the Public Theater Box Office, 425 Lafayette Street, Manhattan.
Tickets are also available through Telecharge at: (212) 239 6200, or online at www.telecharge.com.

David Raksin Hollywood Cabaret

at Joe’s Pub, April

American Composers Orchestra presents composer David Raksin, the reigning patriarch of Hollywood film composers, in ACO’s “Composers Out Front” series at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater on Thursday, April 19th, 2001 at 8:30 pm. Mr. Raksin will sing and play some of his greatest film music, and offer reminiscences of his 60+ years in the film music business. The performance offers a preview of the 88-year-old composer’s music, which is to be featured in ACO’s April 22nd performance of his score from The Bad and the Beautiful at Carnegie Hall.

The Joe’s Pub performance features the New York premiere of Raksin’s new piece for clarinet and string quartet entitled Swing Low Sweet Clarinet, featuring Derek Bermel on clarinet. Joining Mr. Raksin onstage will be pianist Francis Thorne, who will accompany Mr. Raksin in a rendition of his most famous tune, Laura. Raksin will also entertain with stories of the Hollywood heydays, and behind-the-sound-stage antics of his friends and colleagues, including Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin, Miklós Rózsa, Erich Korngold, and Bernard Herrmann.

The performance on April 19th is the last of three concerts featuring composer-performers in the ACO’s second season of “Composers Out Front” at Joe’s Pub. This innovative initiative, created in association with Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, puts composers on stage, making connections between their musical roots as performers and their works for the concert hall.

About David Raksin

David Raksin began his long and distinguished career in films when he came to Hollywood at the age of 23 to work with Charlie Chaplin on the music of Modern Times. A few years later he served as assistant to Leopold Stokowski, who premiered Raksin’s brief Montage with the Philadelphia Orchestra, probably the first film piece to be performed by a major orchestra. Since that time, Mr. Raksin has had a widely diversified career. His many film scores include Laura, Forever Amber and The Bad and the Beautiful. He has scored more than 300 television shows, and written numerous stage works, ballets and musicals. At the request of Igor Stravinsky, Raksin made the original band instrumentation of Stravinsky’s Circus Polka. He is the first member of his profession to have received the prestigious Coolidge Commission from the Library of Congress; he conducted his oratorio Oedipus Memneitai at the Library in 1986.

Mr. Raksin’s concert works, many of them adapted from his film scores, have been performed and recorded by such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago, London, Los Angeles, San Francisco, BBC, CBC symphony orchestras and the Boston Pops. Many of his songs have been recorded; there are more than 400 versions of Laura. He is the first film composer to have had a collection of his manuscripts established by the Library of Congress, which has also appointed him to the National Film Preservation Board. He also served for eight terms as President of the Composers & Lyricists Guild, and is now on the Board of Directors of ASCAP, which gave him its Golden Soundtrack Award for Career Achievement. He is the subject of Oral Histories by Yale and Southern Methodist Universities as well as several television and radio documentations, including The Hollywood Sound. He has taught Composition for Film since 1956 at USC, where he is Adjunct Professor of Music; for 21 years he also taught in the School of Public Administration there, and for 19 years in the USC Music Department.

Raksin often travels as artist-in-residence within the US and in Europe, where he also conducted concerts of music by his colleague Alex North. In January 1998 he traveled to Japan to conduct his music at the new Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall in a concert originally planned by the renowned composer, the late Toru Takemitsu that included music by Nino Rota, Raksin and Takemitsu. In 1999 he appeared with André Previn at the Museum of Modern Art as part of the New York Philharmonic’s celebration of the music of Aaron Copland. In August 2000 he went to the Santa Fe Music Festival for the premiere of his new quintet, Swing Low Sweet Clarinet, written for clarinetist Eddie Daniels.

Tickets & Info:

Seating for the “Composers Out Front” series at Joe’s Pub is limited. Tickets are $20 and are available from TeleCharge at 212-239-6200 or online atwww.telecharge.com. Tickets may also be purchased at The Public Theater box office from 1pm – 7pm daily. Joe’s Pub and The Public Theater are located at 425 Lafayette Street, in lower Manhattan.

Major support of the American Composers Orchestra is from Alliance Capital Management L.P., Americans for the Arts, Arthur M. Blank Foundation, Mr. Thomas Buckner, the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Booth Ferris Foundation, Citigroup Foundation, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Eleanor Naylor Dana Charitable Trust, Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Fan Fox & Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, Fidelity Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Greenwall Foundation, Christian Humann Foundation, Jephson Educational Trust, Meet The Composer, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, J.P. Morgan & Co., New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Times Co. Foundation, Virgil Thomson Foundation, and the Helen F. Whitaker Fund. ACO programs are also made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.