SWR Rundfunkorchester Kaiserslautern & Frank Strobel (Dmitri Shostakovich)

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

SWR Rundfunkorchester Kaiserslautern & Frank Strobel (Dmitri Shostakovich) · The SWR Rundfunkorchester Kaiserslautern is a German radio orchestra of the Südwestrundfunk. Frank Strobel is a German conductor who is much involved with film music, especially music for silent films. Together they recorded the music that Dmitri Shostakovich wrote in 1929 for New Babylon, opus 18. That was a Russian silent film about the Paris Commune, made by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg. Shostakovich was then still a very young man, and he wrote the score for the film himself as orchestral music.

Music and breakthrough

The recording belongs to the part of the course that deals with film music. A silent film has no dialogue and no sound effects, so the music has to carry the story, the tension and the pace. Shostakovich used sharp contrasts for this. There are cheerful, almost mocking passages and rougher ones, and that suits the tension between luxury and popular uprising that the film is about.

Influence

A performance with an orchestra like this makes the score audible apart from the film. In this way the recording shows that film music is a piece of music history in its own right, even when the film itself is almost forgotten.

Listening

• 
  New Babylon, Op. 18: Act 1 · SWR Rundfunkorchester Kaiserslautern & Frank Strobel (Dmitri Shostakovich), 1929

In School of Rock

The chapters, maps and magazine stories of School of Rock are currently available in Dutch only.

• The Dream Factory: Film Reel 1^NL Reader

See also

• Soviet film music