Post by erik on Nov 28, 2020 18:46:47 GMT -5
Continuing in a "family business", Thomas Newman, one of the offspring of ultra-legendary Hollywood film composer Alfred Newman, finds himself in this week's Classical Works Spotlight with a brooding score for one of the many cinematic masterpieces of director Steven Spielberg.
Thomas Newman: BRIDGE OF SPIES
Few people involved in a “family business” in the Hollywood film industry have ever been as prominent as the Newmans. The family became very prominent over the decades when the patriarch of the family, Alfred Newman, became one of the best-known composers of film music during the first seventy years of the industry, with credits that included Twelve O’Clock High, Miracle On 34th Street, How The West Was Won, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his last one, 1970’s Airport. Following his passing on February 17, 1970, a month short of what would have been his 70th birthday, Newman’s siblings followed him into the family business. One of them was his close son Thomas Newman, who was born in 1955. Beginning in the early 1980s, even as his cousins David and Randy were making their impact, Thomas got into scoring dozens of films, including the Stephen King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, 1999’s American Beauty, and the 2012 James Bond entry Skyfall. But one film score chance that came his way was quite surprising, and that was for director Steven Spielberg’s 2015 Cold War drama Bridge Of Spies. The film was based on the saga of a former Nuremberg prosecutor James Donovan (portrayed by Tom Hanks) who, in 1962, engineered a trilateral exchange of prisoners, to wit convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), downed U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), and a Yale University student named Frederic Pryor (Will Powers) caught on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Spielberg’s regular composer John Williams was suffering from minor health problems during the making of the film, but Williams vouched for Newman. While Newman’s score was perhaps more austere than what Williams might have done, the interesting mixture of Shostakovich-influenced music, and more noble American-type themes redolent of Aaron Copland, it nevertheless made an impact on Spielberg’s film, particularly the 11 minute-long cue “Glienicke Bridge”, used in the sequence in which the exchange happens on that bridge, the “Bridge Of Spies”, that connects Potsdam with East Berlin. Incredibly, Thomas Newman is tied with Alex North for the most Academy Award nominations for Best Original Film Score (fifteen) that didn’t result in an actual win; but he has kept going on, with scores for films like 2016’s Passengers, and 2019’s 1917.
Hollywood Film Chorale
Hollywood Studio Symphony Orchestra/THOMAS NEWMAN (Hollywood Records)
Thomas Newman: BRIDGE OF SPIES
Few people involved in a “family business” in the Hollywood film industry have ever been as prominent as the Newmans. The family became very prominent over the decades when the patriarch of the family, Alfred Newman, became one of the best-known composers of film music during the first seventy years of the industry, with credits that included Twelve O’Clock High, Miracle On 34th Street, How The West Was Won, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his last one, 1970’s Airport. Following his passing on February 17, 1970, a month short of what would have been his 70th birthday, Newman’s siblings followed him into the family business. One of them was his close son Thomas Newman, who was born in 1955. Beginning in the early 1980s, even as his cousins David and Randy were making their impact, Thomas got into scoring dozens of films, including the Stephen King adaptations The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, 1999’s American Beauty, and the 2012 James Bond entry Skyfall. But one film score chance that came his way was quite surprising, and that was for director Steven Spielberg’s 2015 Cold War drama Bridge Of Spies. The film was based on the saga of a former Nuremberg prosecutor James Donovan (portrayed by Tom Hanks) who, in 1962, engineered a trilateral exchange of prisoners, to wit convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance), downed U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers (Austin Stowell), and a Yale University student named Frederic Pryor (Will Powers) caught on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. Spielberg’s regular composer John Williams was suffering from minor health problems during the making of the film, but Williams vouched for Newman. While Newman’s score was perhaps more austere than what Williams might have done, the interesting mixture of Shostakovich-influenced music, and more noble American-type themes redolent of Aaron Copland, it nevertheless made an impact on Spielberg’s film, particularly the 11 minute-long cue “Glienicke Bridge”, used in the sequence in which the exchange happens on that bridge, the “Bridge Of Spies”, that connects Potsdam with East Berlin. Incredibly, Thomas Newman is tied with Alex North for the most Academy Award nominations for Best Original Film Score (fifteen) that didn’t result in an actual win; but he has kept going on, with scores for films like 2016’s Passengers, and 2019’s 1917.
Hollywood Film Chorale
Hollywood Studio Symphony Orchestra/THOMAS NEWMAN (Hollywood Records)
