Electric Earth Concerts will bring its audience into the sound of the silver screen with “Cinematic Refuge,” a concert by the Catalyst Quartet, on Friday, Sept. 25, at 7 p.m. at the First Church in Jaffrey.
Catalyst Quartet is a Grammy Award-winning classical quartet including Karla Donehew Perez, violin; Abi Fayette, violin; Paul Laraia, viola; and Karlos Rodriguez, cello.
Rodriguez said the concept for the concert was inspired by the “Golden Age of Hollywood.”
“The whole idea of this program came from the notion that in the golden age of Hollywood, even back to the time of Charlie Chaplin and the beginning of the ‘talkies,’ music has played a vital role in movies,” Rodriguez said. “When we talk about the 1940s and 1950s, and directors like Hitchcock, music was central to creating suspense in the storytelling; it was essential to mood, to the creation of tension.”
While Rodriguez jokes that the idea for a program inspired by cinema was “his baby,” the concept and the creation of “Cinematic Refuge” were a fully collaborative effort by the Catalyst quartet.
“I love this program; it’s just so cool, and I did lead the charge on this one. We have been wanting to do this program in the quartet for a while,” Rodriguez said. “But we do everything collaboratively. We all bring our own ideas to all our meetings and discussions, and we create it all together.”
Catalyst Quartet has been a regular performer with Electric Earth since the members met founder Laura Bagg at the Avaloch Music Institute in Boscawen many years ago.
‘We all had breakfast one morning, and we all just connected, and hope to continue working together in a number of ways,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez said additional inspiration for “Cinematic Refuge,” including the title, came from the role immigrants and refugees played in creating some of Hollywood’s earliest music.
“During the war, there was this huge influx of immigrants. They were people fleeing great strife and persecution during WW II, and many of them fled to the American West,” Rodriguez said. “If they were people who were serious composers in, say, Vienna, they found refuge here. We did not have a culture of serious composition at the time in this country; it did not exist. These immigrants found the ability to pursue their art in a new medium, film, that they had not been trained for, but they turned to cinema to find a way to make money, which was writing music for films.”
Rodriguez said the wave of immigration around WWII “mirrors a lot of what is happening in our world today.”
“This show is very timely in that regard,” Rodriguez said.
The program includes performances of “Fellow Traveler” by John Adams; “On the Nature of Daylight” by Max Richter; “String Quartet No. 3” (Mishima) by Philip Glass; “Echoes for string quartet” (1965) by Bernard Herrmann; and “String Quartet No. 2 in E-flat (1933)” by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.
“The first half of the program is all living composers. They have contributed to our ability to escape our lives through film,” Rodriguez said. “The flip side is how we, as people who enjoy going to the movies, are people who find storytelling through visual medium fascinating. It’s about how we can escape what’s going on in our own lives, and how we escape our own realities through film. All these pieces have connotations, meaning and associations with war, with persecution, and with escape.”
For more information about Electric Earth concerts go to:electricearthconcerts.org.