Orchestra Showbiz and Celebrity Breaking News

Jennie Punter Filmmaker Chloé Robichaud would often listen to classical music in the background to help focus her writing process — a subliminal influence that led to the creation of the main character of “Days of Happiness,” which world premieres in Toronto Sept. 9. Her third feature follows gifted young conductor Emma (Sophie Desmarais) at a pivotal moment in her career as she tries to reset her relationship with her controlling father (who is also her manager) and strengthen a complicated new romantic relationship.

Ben Croll “Maudie” director Aisling Walsh describes her upcoming feature, “Ethel,” in recognizable terms. “We all understand what it is to struggle to be the best at what we can,” Walsh tells Variety. “We’re all looking for that chance to make something happen.” Written by Celeste Parr, produced by Marie-Claude Poulin (“Brooklyn”) of Sphere Media, and presented at this year’s Venice Production Bridge gap-financing market, “Ethel” tells the true story of Ethel Stark – a trailblazing Canadian musician who broke barriers when she founded a mixed-race, all-female orchestra in the 1940s.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor “Not a Word,” which is being sold by international sales agency Beta Cinema, will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in the competitive Platform section. Variety speaks to the film’s writer-director, Hanna Slak, and debuts its trailer. “Not a Word” tells the story of a relationship crisis between a parent and her teenage son.

Ariana Grande has released a new live performance video for ‘Baby I’ as part of her ongoing ‘Yours Truly’ 10th anniversary celebrations – watch it below.The video was filmed at the Soho House in London, where Grande is currently filming for the Wicked movie. The video features the singer surrounded by a full band and mini orchestra, and tapestry with a video of her singing projected onto it.Watch Ariana Grande’s special live rendition of ‘Baby I’ below.‘Baby I’ is the third video to receive the special live video treatment from the ‘Yours Truly’ album to celebrate its 10th anniversary.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The classic Harold Lloyd comedy “Safety Last” is turning 100 years old this year. But with its heavy dollops of action and a superstar’s real-life derring-do, it doesn’t seem a day over 10, even if it does date back to the silent era. The film screens this Sunday as the climax of the Academy Museum’s “Silent Sundays” series, with a live score from a 24-piece orchestra helping heighten the suspense in the ultimate fear-of-heights movie.

Jon Burlingame As Emmy voting draws to a close, members of the Television Academy music peer group is finalizing its choices for awards in seven categories. Here’s a guide, examining the competition in scoring, song, music direction and supervision.

Naman Ramachandran Emmy -winning actor Hannah Waddingham (“Ted Lasso”) will present the Fantasy, Myths and Legends Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Aug. 28. The event is an evening of orchestral works from film, television and gaming, from titles including “Harry Potter,” “Star Wars,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “Game of Thrones” and “World of Warcraft.” The BBC Concert Orchestra led by their new chief conductor, Anna-Maria Helsing, will be joined by mezzo soprano Felicity Buckland and The Huddersfield Choral Society.

Jon Burlingame “Music direction” is the most mysterious of the seven music categories at the Emmys, and eligibility rules have changed over the years. The current definition is: “arranging and orchestrating, composition, supervising of rehearsals and recordings, and conducting both live and prerecorded material.” Explains Adam Blackstone, who won last year as music director of the Super Bowl Halftime Show: “It’s not just about the music. My job is also referee, to make sure things go smoothly.” He is a dual nominee this year, for Fox’s Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show starring Rihanna and HBO Max’s 2022 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony.

Oneohtrix Point Never, a.k.a Daniel Lopatin, has announced details of a new studio album. Again will be released on September 29 via Warp.

Jeff Goldblum and his wife, Emilie Livingston, are full-blown Swifties after attending one of Taylor Swift's concerts in Los Angeles last week.Goldblum and Livingston walked the carpet on Sunday at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank's «A Million Reasons» Fundraiser Celebration in Hollywood, and they spoke with ET's Deidre Behar about being blown away by Swift's show.«I've never been to the SoFi Stadium, so you walk in there and there's 70,000 people, they're all going nuts,» Goldblum recalled with a smile. «We were exchanging friendship bracelets with everybody!»«It's so joyful to see her because she always has been herself and now I feel like she's being celebrated for being herself and she really can bask in that light when she's there in the concert,» Livingston shared, adding that it was extra special for her and her husband as it was the first «real, proper concert» they'd been to together.Goldblum recalled meeting Swift briefly «at that 40th anniversary of [in 2015].

Jeff Goldblum and his wife, Emilie Livingston, are full-blown Swifties after attending one of Taylor Swift's concerts in Los Angeles last week.Goldblum and Livingston walked the carpet on Sunday at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank's «A Million Reasons» Fundraiser Celebration in Hollywood, and they spoke with ET's Deidre Behar about being blown away by Swift's show.«I've never been to the SoFi Stadium, so you walk in there and there's 70,000 people, they're all going nuts,» Goldblum recalled with a smile. «We were exchanging friendship bracelets with everybody!»«It's so joyful to see her because she always has been herself and now I feel like she's being celebrated for being herself and she really can bask in that light when she's there in the concert,» Livingston shared, adding that it was extra special for her and her husband as it was the first «real, proper concert» they'd been to together.Goldblum recalled meeting Swift briefly «at that 40th anniversary of [in 2015].

Naman Ramachandran Stewart Copeland, founder and drummer of The Police, is teaming with Indian musician Ricky Kej on “Police – Beyond Borders” where the legendary rock band’s classic songs are recreated in global languages. The songs include “Every Breath You Take,” “Roxanne” and “Message in a Bottle.” Reinterpretations are in the Kannada, Zulu, Mandarin, Armenian, Pashto, Urdu and Hindi languages, among others. The album follows Copeland’s “Police Deranged for Orchestra” BMG album, released in June, where the band’s hit tracks, arranged for full orchestra, are revisited.

Truck Festival last weekend has gone viral for moshing to an orchestra performance in the rain.During the Oxfordshire festival, the Oxford Symphony Orchestra performed on the festival’s main stage and got a raucous response.After the performance, videos of the crowd have gone viral, which see the crowd creating a rowdy moshpit to the sedate music.Songs given the moshpit treatment included the orchestra’s versions of John Williams’ ‘Indiana Jones Theme’ and Gioachino Rossini’s ‘William Tell Overture’.See footage of the proceedings below.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Award-winning scenic designer David Korins calls his work on Broadway’s newest sensation “Here Lies Love” the “most ambitious piece of theater I’ve ever done.” And that’s a high bar: Korins counts The Oscars, “Beetlejuice” and “Hamilton” among his credits. Set to throbbing beats from David Byrne and Fatboy Slim, “Here Lies Love” centers on the Philippines’ controversial former First Lady, Imelda Marcos. The idea was to make the show as immersive as possible and turn a Midtown Manhattan theater into a disco ballroom.

Ethan Shanfeld Just over a year after her latest studio album “Laurel Hell,” Mitski has returned with new music. On Wednesday, the beloved and hermetic indie rocker released the acoustic ballad “Bug Like an Angel,” which serves as the lead single to her upcoming album “The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,” out Sept. 15 via Dead Oceans.

Jimmy Eat World and Manchester Orchestra are officially on tour together!

The Summer I Turned Pretty's of —titled “Love Scene”—features quite possibly the most romantic moment ever on TV between two star-crossed lovers: and . Set to a sweeping score of a full orchestra, the two—via flashback to the previous winter when Conrad's mom, Susannah, was still alive, and so much sadness and drama didn't exist—make love in front of the fireplace at the Fisher summer house on Cousins Beach. It's sensual, it's romantic, and it's the kind of scene that you want to rewatch over and over again. (Btw, when Belly whispers to a sleeping Conrad that “… there's only you.

Alissa Simon Film Critic Bulgarian multi-hyphenate Stephan Komandarev completes his trilogy on social problems and moral ills in contemporary Bulgaria with “Blaga’s Lessons,” world premiering in Karlovy Vary Film Festival’s Crystal Globe competition. Heretic is the sales agent. After “Directions” (2017), which centers on tough times for some Sofia taxi drivers over a long and eventful night, and “Rounds” (2019), about police officers patrolling the capital, Komandarev and his co-writer Simeon Ventsislavov use an older woman duped by a telephone scam to look at issues afflicting their parents’ generation. Komandarev says: “The Bulgarian pensioners turned out to be the real victims of the so-called ‘transition’ (the time from 1989 to today.) These people, who have worked and created persistently all their lives, have lost basic safety and security, normal food, adequate medical care, heating, etc.”

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor As Emmy voting comes to a close, score mixer Phil McGowan could find himself with multiple nominations, having worked on the sound of Paramount+’s “Star Trek: Picard,” Netflix’s “Cobra Kai” and “Ozark,” and Roku’s “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story.” He spoke with Variety about his approach to each project and what needed to be taken into consideration to preserve the sonic integrity in his mixes. “This season was bigger and more maximal than previous seasons, but there wasn’t a big sonic shift. However, each episode is like a movie. Composers Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson approach it like it’s another ‘Karate Kid’ film. There are guitars, a drum kit, drum machines and lots of percussion. They use a lot of samples that are reminiscent of the 1980s and ’90s. So, I have fun applying mixing techniques with reverb that blends ’80s hair metal and ’90s pop music along with big orchestral symphonic sounds on the show.”

Glastonbury Festival is officially underway, with all the action kicking off across the main stages from Friday, June 23.

On today’s Crew Call we talk with The English composer Federico Jusid, who came into Hollywood’s spotlight after the industry caught his score on the Oscar winning 2009 foreign film, The Secret in Their Eyes.

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music Those with long memories can recall when the otherworldly Icelandic combo Sigur Ros’ music first began filtering over to these shores at the turn of this century — maybe on Napster or Limewire after Radiohead’s Thom Yorke began mentioning them in interviews, or on a burned CD from a friend who had one of their hard-to-find-even-in-metropolises imports. Hearing them for the first time was like taking a voyage to a different musical planet, guided by a vocalist named Jonsi who sang in both Icelandic and an invented language over lush, towering, majestic music that evoked National Geographic landscapes and summoned purple prose from critics even more pretentious than the line you just read. While there were certainly influences — Cocteau Twins, Eno, electronic music and film soundtracks — Sigur Ros were like absolutely no one else, and their sound (and lineup) evolved over the early ‘00s and beyond, incorporating orchestras on one album, rock-centric structures on the next, ambient on the one after, while still remaining unmistakably them.

Sigur Rós have surprise released a new album, almost ten years to the day since their last long player ‘Kveikur’ came out. The new record is called ‘Átta’ and is being released in partnership with BMG, just ahead of their performance with the London Contemporary Orchestra tonight as part of the Southbank Centre’s Meltdown festival.The album features both frontman Jónsi and bassist Georg Holm along with multi-instrumentalist Kjartan Sveinsson, who returned to the band last year.Once back in the studio, Jónsi says, they found themselves “just wanting to have minimal drums and for the music to be really sparse, floaty and beautiful.

Indiana Jones may have had his Cannes world premiere, but Disney saved something special for the Hollywood splash of the alleged final chapter in the franchise, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

Jon Burlingame “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story” has one of the most complicated, and yet stylistically unified, scores of any series this year — Kris Bowers‘ original score, the 18th-century period music, and a surprising number of string-quartet covers of 21st-century hits. The Netflix series, a prequel to the 2021 hit “Bridgerton,” imagines a Black bride for England’s King George III in 1761, chronicling their initially rocky marriage and her gradual understanding of the monarch’s mental illness; flash-forwards to 1817 feature an older and wiser queen. Bowers, who earned two Emmy nominations for his work, returned for the prequel but took a different approach. “This show needed a level of intimacy that the score for ‘Bridgerton’ doesn’t necessarily have,” he says. “My initial instinct was to write for a smaller ensemble, and to mic and mix the music in a way that was more intimate and tactile, a sense of closeness to the instruments.”

Jon Burlingame On the scoring stage at 20th Century-Fox studios in Burbank, composer Jongnic Bontemps is walking around in a “Transformers: The Movie” T-shirt – that’s the animated cartoon from 1986, not the $200-million summer blockbuster he’s just scored. “Violins, play a little softer,” he tells the musicians via intercom from the glass booth behind the stage. “It has to be emotional.” Later, after a rehearsal on a different cue, he tells the string players, “It needs to feel like a warm blanket.” Bontemps is making movie history. He has just spent two years writing the music for “Transformers: Rise of the Beasts,” the seventh in the big-screen franchise, and he’s supervising the recording of the final pieces of the score with a 74-piece orchestra. The film opens Friday.

stream on Max starting June 27.Directed by two-time Oscar winners Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, the film follows the 24-hour performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn as Mac performs renditions of songs dating back to America’s origins in the 18th century, from “Yankee Doodle” to “Gloria.” Along the way, Mac complements the alternative tour of American history with elaborate costumes designed by Mac’s longtime collaborator Machine Dazzle and make-up designer Anastasia Durasova.As the show goes on, one member of Mac’s 24-piece orchestra leaves the stage every hour, until only Mac is left to close out the show after performing this one-time-only performance without any rest.

Brian Eno has announced details of his first-ever solo tour. The run of European dates, scheduled for October, come in support of his 2016 album The Ship. Tickets will be available from Thursday, June 8.

Here Lies Love,” advertising a score by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim and direction by the ground-breaking Tony winner Alex Timbers. The show’s logo is superimposed over a mirror ball, literally reflecting the production’s highly unusual immersive nightclub setting, a semi-ironic counterpoint to a sobering story about the rise and fall of fascistic Filipino power couple Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. The tag line above that disco totem: “The Revolutionary Music Experience.” It’s a revolution that the union representing Broadway musicians would like to stop in its tracks, at least in its current form. And with the show set to open for previews in less than two weeks, the production and the Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians remain at loggerheads about how “Here Lies Love” will, or should, proceed.

Jon Burlingame “Star Trek” fans are still buzzing about the music of the final season of “Picard.” That’s because the lavish symphonic score by Stephen Barton and Frederik Wiedmann references multiple themes from throughout the 57-year history of “Trek” movies and TV shows. Barton, who scored seven of the 10 episodes and collaborated with Wiedmann on the finale, says that the idea belonged to showrunner Terry Matalas. “From the very beginning, we chatted a lot about the ‘Star Trek’ we grew up with. This was a moment in the franchise to take a step back, look at the whole picture, and say, how can we honor this?” Matalas has “an amazing, vast knowledge” of “Trek” music, Wiedmann says. “He’s as enthusiastic about film scores as we are – which, in the end, was extremely helpful for us because Terry had such a clear idea on where to go with the music.”