Written by Scottish composer and artist Erland Cooper for the women of the Chorus of Opera North, a new live score for the elemental 1928 silent film The Wind receives its world premiere at Sage Gateshead on 24 February 2022.
The latest commission in Opera North’s FILMusic series tours to RNCM Manchester on 25 February and closes at the Howard Assembly Room, Leeds on 26 February.
The film was directed by pioneering Swedish film director, screenwriter, and actor Victor Seastrom and features Lillian Gish – the First Lady of American Cinema (main image) and her part as Letty Mason is one of the finest of her career. The film made a loss when first released (although it did well in Europe), much of which is put down to many films then being released featured dialogue/ talking sequences.
Lillian Gish plays a young woman cast out into the dust bowl of the Texan prairie, where an act of savagery – and the unrelenting northerly wind – push her mind beyond its limits. The film was shot in the Mojave Desert under great hardship.
The Wind has since been hailed as one of the great classics of silent cinema. In a review by MOMA, they wrote: “What makes The Wind such an eloquent coda to its dying medium is Seastrom’s and Gish’s distillation of their art forms to the simplest, most elemental form: there are no frills. Seastrom was always at his best as a visual poet of natural forces impinging on human drama; in his films, natural forces convey drama and control human destiny. Gish, superficially fragile and innocent, could plumb the depths of her steely soul and find the will to prevail. The genius of both Seastrom and Gish comes to a climactic confluence in The Wind. Gish is Everywoman, subject to the most basic male brutality and yet freshly open to the possibility of romance. As a result, the film offers a quintessential cinematic moment of the rarest and most transcendentally pure art.”
Born and raised on Orkney, Erland’s sensitivity to the relationship between landscape and psychology has been a constant throughout a diverse and collaborative career.
For this commission, he employs the voices of the 18-strong Chorus, together with his own textural recordings and live analogue processing, to open up a new imaginative space for a forgotten masterpiece.
He comments: “The Wind is like a requiem to a dying medium or art form. I want to echo that in a simple live score created predominantly from the human voice that touches on its drama and poetry, combining clouds of sound and textures in an almost tone poem score.”
He adds: “The Mojave Desert could not be further away from the Orkney Islands where I grew up, but an archipelago is surrounded by frequent gale force winds that drive and turn a cycle of shelter and search for safe havens, from both external and internal elements”.
Jo Nockels, Head of Projects, Opera North, comments: “Erland’s decision to make the score for The Wind almost entirely from the human voice is a wonderfully powerful response to the combined claustrophobia and loneliness of the film.
“He is able to use the voice not just to represent the wind that always threatens to engulf everything, but the menace the film builds and the psyche of Lillian Gish’s luminous Letty.”
For details and booking links, visit: https://www.operanorth.co.uk/news/erland-scores-a-silent-masterpiece-for-the-chorus-of-opera-north/