AARP The Magazine - January/February 2010

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Screen and Heard

GREAT FILMS GAIN NEW LIFE WHEN AN ORCHESTRA PLAYS THE SCORE

Ludwig Wicki conducts Lord of the Rings at Wolf Trap.

Movies for Grownups®

A SOFT BREEZE wafts
through the amphitheater
at Wolf Trap National Park near Washing-
ton, D.C. Conductor Ludwig Wicki raises
his baton. As the Filene Center Orchestra
strikes its opening notes, a massive movie
screen behind it flashes to life with Lord
of the Rings: The Two Towers. The effect is
breathtaking. Howard Shore’s Grammy-
winning score has been removed from the
movie soundtrack and rendered as a per-
fectly synchronized live performance.

Across the country, orchestras are draw-
ing their biggest crowds of the year with
full-length screenings of music-heavy
films such as the Rings series and The
Wizard of Oz; resurrected scores for old
silent films; or tightly edited tributes, such
as the traveling Star Wars: In Concert show
(local orchestras promote these screenings
heavily in newspapers). New computer
technology, utilizing readouts visible only
to the conductor, enables musicians to
match their performances with the split-
second requirements of modern films. In
the case of The Two Towers, conductor
Wicki keeps at it for nearly three hours.

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After three albums of impeccable jazz-pop, Norah
Jones explores the dark territory of Love Gone
Bad on her latest, The Fall. Artful electric-
guitar commotion by Marc Ribot accompanies the singer-songwriter’s
trademark late-night ruminations in such tunes as “Waiting,”
“You’ve Ruined Me,” “Stuck,” and other snapshots of romantic
disaster. When “Man of the Hour” shows up in the album’s final
track, he turns out to be just another dog—literally. —Richard Gehr

BITTER THAN EVER

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Twitter is clearly
an overdue outlet for
our national creativ-
ity. Challenged to
“explain a facet of
modern life in the
style of Dr. Seuss,” for
example, Twitterer
@smacbuck crafted
this miniature master-
piece: “I mail, I text, I
tweet, I blog, / I build
a Facebook
for my dog, / I
speak no words,
I shake no hands, /
I am at last a modern
man.” —Allan Fallow
Books

Brevity: The Soul of Twit?

Twitter—the website that broadcasts 140-character messages from millions of users—climbs a notch on the Respectability Scale with the release of David Pogue’s The World According to Twitter. The tech columnist for The New York Times asked questions of those following him on Twitter, then showcased the “winning tweets” here.