This year’s contenders for the original score Oscar are an innovative and international mix and, for the first time in more than a quarter century, two musicals are among the nominees: “Emilia Pérez” and “Wicked.”
Three are past Oscar winners: German Volker Bertelmann (for “All Quiet on the Western Front”), Americans Stephen Schwartz (he has three, all for animated musicals) and Kris Bowers (curiously, not for music but for last year’s music-themed documentary short “The Last Repair Shop”). Three more are newcomers to Oscar: Englishman Daniel Blumberg and French composers Camille and Clément Ducol.
For “The Brutalist,” experimentalist composer Blumberg supplied Brady Corbet’s epic about a Holocaust survivor’s challenges in America with a small orchestra score played by just 18 musicians but recorded all over Europe. Renowned London pianist John Tilbury performs much of the key material.
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Tilbury, 89, “has a beautiful Steinway literally in a shed in his garden in Kent,” says Blumberg. “I basically moved in with him for a month. I put microphones next to his face so you can hear him breathe as well. Brady really wanted that kind of presence of the pianist, the intimacy of that.”
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Highlighting the mystery and tension of Edward Berger’s Vatican thriller “Conclave” is Bertelmann’s music, which avoids traditional church sounds (organ, choirs) in favor of nervous string figures, explosive prepared piano and the colors of the Cristal Baschet, whose strange sonorities are the product of glass rods rubbed by wet fingertips.
“I needed something that was ethereal, that had a spiritual space, but that also sounded modern,” says Bertelmann. “Also, with all the traditions of the religion, I needed something that came from the tradition of classical music, so I turned to bowed instruments (the strings).”
“Emilia Pérez,” French director Jacques Audiard’s operatic, Spanish-language, set-in-Mexico crime drama with a twist, is told largely through music – not just the 14 original songs, but via a dramatic score filled with vocal sounds, supplied mostly by singer-songwriter Camille but also through the music of Ducol.
“Jacques thought that we were like an opera troupe or a theater band,” says Camille. “We didn’t want to focus on one musical style or do a neo-Mexican musical. It mixes all genres.” Their score (as opposed to the songs) constitutes more than a third of the total music in the film.
Twenty-one years after its Broadway debut, “Wicked,” Schwartz’s musical backstory of the witches of Oz, finally made it to the big screen. But its 11 songs are only a part of the film’s lavish musical treatment, which required an 85-piece orchestra and 60-voice choir. Schwartz and English film composer John Powell collaborated on the dramatic score.
One catch: Powell had never seen the show. “This was going to be a real movie,” he remarks, “and I think the process of changing it from one form into another probably could do with somebody who would just come in and see it this new way.”
Bowers’ rich orchestral score underlines the emotional beats of “The Wild Robot,” Chris Sanders’ winning animated film about a robot who reluctantly learns parenting skills when forced to rear an orphan gosling on a far-off island. Recorded in London with an 80-piece orchestra and 40-voice choir, it also features a four-person New York percussion ensemble for the organic sounds of the forest locale.
“Becoming a parent played a pretty massive role,” says the composer. “My daughter was only six months old when I got the job. When I was writing the migration sequence, I thought a lot about what that experience would be like for myself — about dropping my daughter off at college, saying goodbye to her. A lot of those thoughts were at the core of working on this film.”
