Archived performance
Performance details
8 August 2019 at 7.30pm
9 August 2019 at 7.30pm
10 August 2019 at 2pm
10 August 2019 at 7.30pm
Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall
About this performance
Program
Suites and selections from The Proposition, The Road, Hell or High Water, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, West of Memphis and Wind River.
Featuring
Benjamin Northey conductor
Nick Cave & Warren Ellis soloistsAbout the performance
The concert
The past 15 years has seen Nick Cave and Warren Ellis compose for both indie films and Hollywood features. Their first commissioned soundtrack, the brutal outback western The Proposition (2005) directed by John Hillcoat and scripted by Cave himself, introduced the widescreen compositions that would become their signature for future films.
Big studio work beckoned in the shape of Andrew Dominik’s anti-western The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007). The eerie score underwrote the movie’s sombre mood and the lead character’s impending doom.
Cave and Ellis reunited with Hillcoat for the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s highly successful novel The Road (2009). The artfully minimal score combined with mournful piano and clanging industrial percussion, enhanced the lurking malice.
‘’Very often a tension can happen between music and picture that is about chance and a kind of unknowingness that can be really amazing. Just by putting together two things that were created in isolation, music and film, suddenly something quite magical can happen.”