New Classics

This unique DVD features music written by Ed Hughes for a series of silent films, both new and old. Ed Hughes is a master of large scale works and these movie scores are a little more traditionally styled than his usual chamber and operatic work. Whichever genre is chosen, his reputation as a highly inventive and skilled composer grows steadily. The main piece here is a ‘Brighton: Symphony of a City’, by producer/director Lizzie Thynne. This seven movement celebration of Brighton brings together past and present scenes, from hardy bathers and beach hijinks to present day hipsters and an obsession with looking at screens. Ed Hughes’s music is perfectly judged to empathise with the joyful and occasionally sombre moments, superbly edited by Phil Reynold, culminating in an explosive fireworks finale. Elsewhere on the DVD, Hughes has written music for intriguing fragments of the first ever Alice In Wonderland film (now over a hundred years old), the famous classic 1902 Georges Méliès film Le Voyage dans le Lune (Voyage to the Moon), piano accompaniment for a magical, surreal animation of Gogol’s short story Le Nez (The Nose) by Russian born Alexandre Alexeieff and his American wife Claire Parker, and Night Music, reflecting bombing raids during the Second World War. Artists include Clare Hammond, New Music Players, Orchestra of Sound and Light and Richard Casey. A bonus film extra is Sky Giant, a sound film documentary providing historical context and a tribute to the unmistakable Avro Lancaster bomber.

—John Pitt