Orchestra Supplies Live Music For Film Classic 'Casablanca'

If you think you've had the full Casablanca movie experience, think again. You might have seen it, and you certainly recognize the dialog. But you haven't properly heard the music of the film. Lucky you, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra will remedy this problem on Friday night.

For the fourth consecutive year, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra will collaborate with Turner Classic Movies to bring the classic film's soundtrack to life at Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre at Encore Park.

Staff Conductor Jere Flint will lead the Orchestra in the score from Casablanca, which will be shown on big screens, on Friday, July 15, at 8:30 p.m. at the Amphitheatre. Ben Mankiewicz, weekend daytime host of Turner Classic Movies®, will host the evening.

Visit www.vzwamp.com for information and tickets, which start at $18.30 with fees for the lawn and up to $43 for table seating.

The ASO's second concert of summer 2011 has the full symphonic orchestra performing the score to the classic 1942 film, which stars Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Berman, and won a Best Picture Oscar.

Jere Flint will conduct the orchestra.

"They are going to show the film, minus the score that was on the film in the background. If you actually ever watched the film, the score in music is very, very quiet in the background, sometimes almost nonexistent," Flint said.

Whether that was on purpose or caused by deterioration of the film, Flint can't say. But he did say it is a glorious score.

"What we are doing is playing the score that Max Steiner wrote virtually verbatim while the film plays," Flint said.

"I think  you will get much more sense of drama, the romance," he said. "It's a grand experience for the audience to finally hear the score that was written by Max Steiner."

The conductor will have two TV monitors in front of him. One will show the film as it is being played on the amphitheater's two big screens. The other monitor will simply have a large clock on it, with a sweep second hand. That's a critical tool for Flint.

"In the score at various points, I have to be with the clock. If it says three minutes, 16 seconds, I am to be at that point in the score," he said.

The orchestra and its conductor can't slow down the film by not keeping pace. It's not as easy as you'd think, he said. Almost every four or five bars there's a change in movement or tempo, or a change in instruments as the drama moves on screen, he said.

The score is more difficult for the orchestra than performing a score for a movie with much more singing, such as last year's performance of The Wizard of Oz, he said.

But Casablanca is a very popular film and Friday night's concert will be enjoyed the the audience, he predicted.

The orchestra has another struggle to which the audience can relate: the heat. There will be a few fans blowing onstage and an attempt at blowing cold air, but it's such a huge, wide open stage that those won't be that much help. The heat affects the musicians just like the audience, which is why the men will wear  short sleeve white shirts, and the women, short sleeve white blouses.

"You do sweat playing there's no doubt about it," Flint said. "It's part of the hazards of the job, you might say. But the facility itself is so beautiful in being outside. It's something we can put up with and still enjoy ourselves. And of course the audience can enjoy it, too."

Making the night bearable for the musicians will be an intermission approximately halfway through the film, which is just under two hours long.

"It's in a good spot, the break comes at a high drama point," Flint said.

Flint points out that few Hollywood films these days, aside from those with John Williams, have full orchestras. When Casablanca was made, the studios had full orchestras gathered around microphones to play the score as the movie played.

The full orchestra back then–and this Friday–provides a very lush sound, he said.

In addition to being a cellist in the ASO for three decades, Flint has served as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Youth Orchestra since 1979.

This article first appeared on Alpharetta-Milton Patch.