MOUNT HOLYOKE ORCHESTRA
TO PERFORM SCORE FOR 1927 SILENT CLASSIC PHANTOM OF THE OPERA

One-time performance scheduled for October 30

SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. – Silent films were never truly silent. From the beginning, filmmakers recognized the added dimension that music would bring to the cinema experience and suggested orchestral pieces suitable to accompany swordfights, chases, romantic moments, and other scenes.

With the advent of "talkies," movie house orchestra pits disappeared overnight. Today, when silent films are shown, they are frequently accompanied by recorded music or, in some cases, a live trio or quartet. Very seldom is a silent film shown with full orchestral accompaniment.

All of which means that filmgoers can look forward to a rare treat this month. On Saturday, October 30, just in time for Halloween, The Phantom of the Opera, the 1927 classic starring Lon Chaney, will be shown with a score performed by the Mount Holyoke College Orchestra. The group, under the direction of Mark Bartley, visiting instructor in music, will perform a 1990 score by Gabriel Thibaudeau, a Canadian composer who has acquired an international reputation for providing background music for silent film.

Guest artist Mara Bonde, soprano, will perform the singing parts of Christine Daae, the Paris Opera singer who is the object of the Phantom's desires. Bonde, a 1991 Mount Holyoke graduate who is critically acclaimed for an electric stage presence and sweet purity of tone, has performed in diverse venues throughout the United States and Europe.

The single performance, in Mary Woolley Hall's Chapin Auditorium, will represent a significant achievement for the relatively young orchestra, which was founded in the spring of 2000 as a student organization and became a music department ensemble three years ago.

Bartley had been pondering the live cinema performance idea for two years and decided that the orchestra would be seasoned enough to tackle the undertaking this fall. Throughout the summer, he submerged himself in a crash course in silent film, trying to find one that would best meet the orchestra's needs. When he saw Phantom, he knew he had found the right film. When to show the film? It had to be the Saturday before Halloween, of course.

" This has all the challenges of an opera or a musical, without the luxury of having live actors," said Bartley, who has led the orchestra since 2001. The film runs exactly 93 minutes, and, unlike live theatre, it can neither speed up nor slow down to accommodate the orchestra; "The tempos have to be exact," he said.

Unlike other orchestral works, which offer pauses between movements for the musicians to take a breath and prepare themselves for whatever comes next, the score offers not a single moment of silence in its 93 minutes, noted Jaime Tung, concertmaster, first violinist, and junior from Edgewood, Washington.

"We're constantly concentrating and listening, and it's exhausting," said Tung, who is majoring in English and minoring in critical social thought. "When the tempo changes and the mood changes, you've got to be ready. There's going to be no [time for] mopping of the brow for Mark."

Like Bartley, Tung is impressed with the beauty of Thibaudeau's score. "The music, as a whole, is extremely well composed. It's a gorgeous symphony," she said. As befits one of the all-time "creepy" films, she said, "there's so much dissonance in the piece," unsettling chords that by themselves can raise the hairs on the back of the neck, movie or no movie. "I listened to it alone in my room, late at night, and I was terrified," Tung confessed.

An acid test for the film came when Bartley first screened it for the orchestra. In the climactic scene, when Christine approaches the Phantom from behind and removes his mask, revealing Chaney's disfigured face, "there was quite a reaction from the group. I was pleased to see that the moment still packs its punch."

On October 30, the music will pack a punch, too. As Tung notes, "it gives a whole new meaning to 'surround sound.' "

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The Phantom of the Opera

Date: October 30, 2004
Time: 7:30 pm
Location: Chapin Auditorium, Mary Woolley Hall, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Mass.
Admissions/Ticket Information: $8 general admission, $5 students and senior citizens; tickets at the door
Sponsor: Mount Holyoke College music department

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About the MHC Orchestra

Begun as a student organization in the spring of 2000 by Lisa Utzinger '02 and Sara Curtin '02, the Mount Holyoke College Orchestra has steadily gained popularity among the student body and surrounding community. P. George Mathew conducted the first concert (2000), David Gibson the next two (2000-2001). Mark Bartley became conductor in the fall of 2001 when the orchestra became a music department ensemble, and the group then began playing a full season of concerts throughout the academic year.

Although a relatively young organization, the MHC Orchestra has already collaborated with a long list of ensembles: Boston University Choral Society; Boston University Men's Chorus; Cornell University Hangovers; Euridice Quartet; New England Conservatory Children's Chorus; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Symphony Orchestra; WPI Men's Glee Club; Yale Camerata; MHC Concert Choir, Glee Club, Chamber Singers and Family Chorus; Jazz Ensembles of MHC; MHC English Handbell Choir.

About Mara Bonde

Bonde made her Boston Pops debut under the direction of Keith Lockhart in Brush Up Your Shakespeare, which was nationally televised on PBS's Evening at Pops. Since then she has become a frequent guest artist with that orchestra. Also on the concert stage, she has sung with the Utah, San Diego, New Haven, Syracuse, and Nashua symphony orchestras, the Handel & Haydn Society, the Boston Baroque Orchestra, and the OPUS Chamber Orchestra. Upcoming engagements include her debut with the Cape Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Royston Nash singing Mahler's Symphony No. 4 and Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, and a return to the Utah Symphony for Poulenc's Stabat Mater. She performs regularly with the Boston Musical Theater, both here and abroad, and this spring will tour with them in Russia. Bonde has worked with such notable conductors as Daniel Beckwith, Bernard Labadie, Stewart Robertson, Gerald Steichen, Julian Wachner, and the late Robert Shaw. She appears as soloist in Ravel's Trois Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis on Shaw's Telarc recording Appear and Inspire and is also the featured soloist on Music for Voices by Allen Brings, newly released on Capstone Records.

A national semifinalist in the 2002 Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and the first prize winner in the 2003 Annamaria Saritelli-DiPanni Bel Canto Vocal Scholarship Awards, Bonde has sung the roles of Frasquita in Carmen, Mrs. Nordstrom in A Little Night Music, and Sister Miriam in The Three Hermits with the Utah Opera; the title roles in Mollicone’s Starbird and Lehar's Frasquita with the Opera Company of North Carolina; Despina in Così fan Tutte, Clorinda in Cinderella, and Carolina Etheridge in the world premiere of Kitty Hawk with National Opera Company (Raleigh); Adina in The Elixir of Love with Boston’s Longwood Opera; and Berta in Il Barbiere di Siviglia with the Lake George Opera Festival. This summer she will cover the title role in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience and Clomiri in Handel's Imeneo with Glimmerglass Opera.