MUSIC FROM THE TWILIGHT SAGA FOR CHAMBER ORCHESTRA

“I tried to translate the sound that you hear from a big orchestra, to distill it down to the basic elements and put it into a chamber setting,” Redfeld explained.  “I thought a lot about Mozart while I was adapting all of this music, and evoking the kind of clarity you hear in chamber music. I think it worked really well with these selections.”

Dan Redfeld is a classically trained concert pianist and composer/conductor who studied at Boston’s New England Conservatory.  While many of his fellow students were embracing modernistic, atonal music, Redfeld was more interested in tonal, neo-romantic music, an inclination grounded by his studies with acclaimed composer and pianist William Thomas McKinley.  At the same time, Redfeld discovered a love for film music through the work of John Williams in JAWS and STAR WARS.  Through McKinley, Redfeld met and watched Williams at work with the Boston Pops, and the famous film composer’s influence settled into his artistic design.  Redfeld began scoring short films for the American Film Institute, and in a day when many film composers were coming out of popular music into Hollywood film scoring careers, he found his academic background particularly advantageous to the music he was writing.

“Howard Shore comes from a very traditional classical background,” he continued.  “He has a deep understanding of opera which I think you really feel in his music.   Alexandre Desplat is the new voice for me, with a strong classical background.  Again there's a tie in this lineage that goes back a century. Carter Burwell does come out of popular music but certainly with his music for TWILIGHT and some of his other scores there seems to be an understanding or the feel of an operatic background.”

Redfeld also performs as the pianist on the recording, which features Elizabeth Hedman on violin, Ira Glansbeek on cello, and soprano Kristi Holden, (currently starring as Christine Daaé in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s PHANTOM: THE VEGAS SPECTACULAR.  “These three instruments form the core group to perform these concentrated transmutations of TWILIGHT’s orchestral scores,” described Randall D. Larson in the liner notes.  “One striking element that Dan Redfeld added to the ensemble that hadn’t been in any of the original performances was the harmonic element of vocalise.” A vocalise is a vocal exercise (often one suitable for performance) without words, which is sung on one or more vowel sounds.

“Film music is the classical music of the day,” Redfeld said.  “I look at film music as if it's no different from what Bach or Mozart or Stravinsky did – composers throughout history have worked on commission.