Read on to discover which classical musicians should star in Hollywood blockbusters....
The recent popularity of classical musicians on the Hollywood big screen...
More than the usual number of classical music stories have made it onto our screens recently, from Cate Blanchett’s conductor-skewering Tár to Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, his love-letter to Leonard Bernstein; from Stephen Williams’s Chevalier, on the astounding life of Joseph Bologne, to Angelina Jolie’s vividly stylish turn as Maria Callas. Too much of a good thing? Impossible – Hollywood’s just getting started! Expect all of these soon...
Hollywood take note... these classical musicians should have their own blockbusters
Dmitri Shostakovich: Die Another Day
Dmitri Shostakovich: the real Die Another Day. Denounced by Stalin. Interrogated by the secret police. What happened when Shostakovich was questioned by Stalin’s henchmen? What battles of the soul played out in that bunker in 1937, as Shostakovich fought for his life, answering accusations that he was involved in a plot to overthrow Stalin? And what was the miracle that meant he survived when he was asked to return a few days later – usually a sign of a long stay in the gulag, or worse. Was it administrative coincidence that his case was dropped, or the intervention of some higher power – Soviet, Stalin, or supernatural?
Ethel Smyth: Rebel With a Cause
Ethel Smyth: Rebel With a Cause. Composer. Suffragette. Free-thinker. Ethel Smyth’s life across the 20th century makes her a front-running candidate for Cate Blanchett’s next Oscar-winning role. ‘The March of the Women’ is just the most famous piece of a life in which boundaries were broken. Smyth refused to be pigeon-holed, fighting for her own voice in her compositions, just as much as she did for the Suffragettes – and as she did in her affairs of the heart, from Henry Bennet Brewster to Virginia Woolf. Smyth is a rebel for her time, and ours.
More classical musicians in Hollywood blockbusters...
William Byrd and the Gunpowder plot
William Byrd and the Gunpowder Plot: thought Wolf Hall was full of intrigue and skullduggery? That’s nothing compared to the way William Byrd negotiated life as England’s most famous composer, and one of its most celebrated Catholics in the 16th and 17th centuries. How did he appeal to Anglican and Protestant royalty while never giving up his faith? His late masses, written for secret performance in priest-holes and Catholic houses, are musical jewels for all time. But might they also be coded collections, whose secrets of rebellion and insurrection haven’t yet been uncovered? Mark Rylance stars as Byrd: recusant, musical radical and man of mystery.
But wait, there's more... Hollywood shouldn't forget these musicians
And those are just the ones that Hollywood ought to have greenlit: look out in the future for a Name of the Rose-style mystery on how two composers, Léonin and Pérotin, exploded medieval imaginations with the invention of polyphony around 1200 at Notre-Dame in Paris, and an arthouse treatment of the magic of Carlos Kleiber’s conducting: the most dangerously intoxicating choreography there’s ever been. Classical music’s golden age on the silver screen has just begun!
