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Carl Davis interviewHave you scored dance before? Yes, I've done many ballets, several of which are held in the repertoire of various companies. I did some for Northern Ballet theatre - one about the life of Lowry, called A Simple Man, and then a full-length ballet of A Christmas Carol - I’ve done a version of Alice in Wonderland for ENB, I did a large ballet based on the Aladdin story for Scottish ballet, and I worked with this Company a long time ago on a ballet called A picture of Dorian Gray which was so x-rated that it had to be removed very hurriedly from the repertoire! So when I got the call from David, he wasn't talking to a beginner! The Cyrano story is familiar to many. Do you think this helps? Audiences are attracted by stories they know something about, as we can see from the popular success of A Christmas Carol or, indeed, traditional pantomime. It is hard for a big new ballet to fill a theatre if its subject is little known. You’re transposing a story to another medium, so it's important for the public to have something they might know. They know that Cyrano is the story about the guy with the big nose, but ultimately it’s a matter of how well and beautifully that story is told. How does creating a score for a ballet that's being created alongside it differ from projects like your silent film accompaniment, where the entire visual already exists? With silent film, because the film is already finished, I have to try and ensure that my music fits with it. And sometimes you have dance sequences, and that's really hard, because you’ve got to match the steps. If you’re doing a new film, and there's a dance sequence or music, that will start with the music - you would actually provide the music for them to film to. And in the world of ballet, they really want to start with the music before they do the choreography, that's the order. So the music can be seen as a parallel experience, or a real interlocking one. In this case, as we're not doing an abstract story, and we're doing a ballet based on a play, we have characters, we have subjects, we have drama, we have action which has to be articulated, there’s duelling, love scenes, showing off scenes, and conflict, emotional conflict. So there's all sorts of levels to it, and it was only when David and myself felt that I’d got it right, that the music was expressing his ideas, that he felt that he could go ahead and choreograph to it. Click here to continue to the second part of the interview (2 of 3). |
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