Yahoo Lifestyle L.A. Fire Relief Benefit Concert Staged by Film Composers to Benefit Musicians Who’ve Lost Their Homes
Seven top film, TV and game composers presented a concert of their works Saturday night in West Los Angeles as a benefit for musicians whose homes burned during the recent Palisades and Eaton fires. The event is one of several staged in recent weeks to raise funds and awareness for those who lost homes during the fires.
Approximately 160 members of the Hollywood film music community attended the sold-out event at The Village, raising an estimated $70,000. The 43-piece orchestra, all of whom donated their services, included five musicians who lost their homes and all their belongings.
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One of the seven composers, longtime Sundance Film Music Program director Peter Golub, lost his studio and much of his life’s work in the Palisades fire. Yet during the past two weeks he managed to write a new piece, “Reverie and Waltz,” and he conducted it at the concert.
“It was a great distraction from everything else,” Golub said, “but it was also a reminder of the power of music. It’s a cliché to say that music has a healing power, but it actually does. And it connects us to other people. So I’m very grateful for the opportunity to write this piece.”
The 10-minute work for strings, featuring violinist Luanne Homzy, was dedicated to composer James Newton Howard and his wife Annica, who launched a crowd-funding piece on Golub’s behalf during the days after the wildfires. The two collaborated on the score for the Denzel Washington film “The Great Debaters” and have remained fast friends for many years.
Howard opened the concert with a classically styled suite from his score for “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.” He called the event “a much-needed morale booster” for the community and voiced what everyone in the room silently acknowledged: that “many close friends” had lost their homes in the disaster.
Recent Grammy winner Stephanie Economou conducted her lively suite from “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3,” and Marco Beltrami (who quipped, “I don’t get hired a lot to write happy music”) conducted an arrangement of Bach’s Prelude in A Minor. Its downbeat mood and unexpected dissonance mirrored the confusion and horror felt by many watching the out-of-control fires just four weeks ago.
Composer Anna Drubich, who played piano throughout the concert, offered a dramatic suite from her score for the Russian film “The Master and Margarita.”
Harry Gregson-Williams played two pieces: a melancholy excerpt from his score for “Gone Baby Gone” and a contrastingly joyful non-film piece titled “Two Girls with Sparklers.” Gregson-Williams evacuated his Palisades residence for three and a half weeks but luckily his home and studio survived; he dedicated the performance to his assistant, Ryder McNair, whose home was lost.
Composer Aaron Zigman concluded the evening with two symphonic pieces: a non-film piece titled “Hope” and “Once Upon a Night” from his recent oratorio, “Émigré,” featuring powerful vocals from soprano Diana Newman and tenor Arnold Livingston Geis.
The benefit was organized by the innovative performing-arts organization K17, and introduced by K17 founder and cellist Evgeny Tonkha, with support from BMI and Hollywood Scoring.
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