Megalopolis
Megalopolis (film soundtrack and orchestral suite) (2024)
At the end of March 2003 I received a handwritten letter by Francis, that I have kept on top of my piano all these years:
After reading the letter I went to the Napa Valley to visit Francis for a few days and we read together the version of the Megalopolis script in which he was working at the time. He told me that the reason he was interested in my music is that he wanted to work with a composer outside of the Hollywood tradition.
Francis asked if I would compose a Megalopolis Symphony developing in music the themes of the film. I loved the idea and set out to sketch it. Sometime later Francis told me he was shelving the project for a while and would work on a smaller film: Youth Without Youth. I was very happy when he invited me to write the music for it, and then for Tetro and for Twixt (the latter together with Dan Deacon). Even happier when 20 years after the initial letter, Francis invited me to write the score for Megalopolis and sent me the new script: some plotlines and scenes were completely new to me, and some I remembered from twenty years earlier.
In February 2023 I visited the Megalopolis set. Francis' greeting, after several years of not seeing each other, was: “Oh, Osvaldo, we need a big love theme…because the love story is what will hook the audience the first time they see the film, and they’ll come back later to absorb the other layers”. I said, “great, what kind of love theme?” and he replied “like Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, but geometric”. I chortled because that’s a perfect example of the language Francis uses to convey his vision: utterly surprising and surprisingly precise.
Fast-forward one year, and we had over 100 minutes of orchestral music, and hours of percussion music. Luckily, Francis's memory is prodigious so he remembered all of it and experimented with a variety of cues for many scenes.
We recorded the orchestra at East-West Connection in Budapest. The immensely talented Arturo Rodriguez conducted it all. It was a very exciting week. We loved the orchestra and found the players to be open and warm hearted. The entire week concluded, movingly, with Francis conducting the orchestra in the Hungarian Anthem.
Conductor: Arturo Rodriguez
Concertmaster: Rodrigo Puskas
Soloists: Cyro Baptista, percussion (15, 22, 23, 25); Dan Brantigan, trumpet, flugelhorn (10, 13,14,15,16,19), Edmar Colon, saxophones (5); Johnny Gandelsman, violin (6,8); Jamey Haddad, percussion (15, 22, 23, 25); Dennis James, Glass Armonica (10, 12, 13); Yo-Yo Ma, violoncello (2); Natalia Pairuz, musical saw (14, 18); Stephen Prutsman, organ & piano: (3, 6, 11, 18, 25); Rodrigo Puskas, violin (13); Renata Scoto, voice (4); Janne Thomsen, flute (14, 18, 34); Jeremy Udden, saxophone (2, 15, 22); Grace VanderWaal, voice (9,17); Michael Ward Bergeman, hyper accordion (2, 14, 15, 23).