By Julien Allen
The history of cinema is replete with choral music. Its power and beauty is so often perfectly suited to the visual impact of big screen moments. The great Russian classical composer Sergei Prokofiev wrote for Sergei Eisenstein’s monumental 1938 epic Alexander Nevsky. The grandeur of this piece even conjured images of battle, desolation and joy on the South Bank in 2018, when it was performed by The Bach Choir.
Bach’s ever-present influence on Hollywood
Soundtracks have always made extensive use of J S Bach’s music in particular, from as early as 1938 (French master Max Ophuls’ melodrama The Novel of Werther, which contains extracts from the Mass in B Minor, the work which led to the formation of The Bach Choir) through the extraordinary fictional concert film The Chronicle of Anna-Magdalena Bach (Straub-Huillet, 1968) to Steven Spielberg’s science fiction classic Minority Report (2002) which, like so many before it, borrows from Bach’s Cantata BWV 147: “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” and juxtaposes its poignant lyricism with a key dramatic sequence wherein Tom Cruise is confronted with the full extent of the villainy working against him.
A choir of the past and the future
The Bach Choir itself has been regularly providing its voice to new works by contemporary film composers since it began its collaboration with Harry Gregson-Williams in 2005, on two big-budget Hollywood productions: the children’s fantasy adaptation The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and the Crusades action-drama Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom. In Kingdom, the track entitled Crusaders is a subtle neo-Gregorian chant which showcases the sublime vocal control of the Bach Choir’s upper voices.
Kingdom of Heaven was directed by one of the most celebrated figures in Hollywood, the British film director/producer/mogul Ridley Scott, who would go on to use The Bach Choir again on four more occasions. The Choir sang on the soundtracks to Robin Hood (2010) starring Russell Crowe, Prometheus (2012) – a prequel to his Alien (1979) – with Michael Fassbender and Charlize Theron and the multi-Oscar-nominated sci-fi smash The Martian (2015) starring Matt Damon.
This fruitful collaboration (with Ridley Scott and Harry Gregson-Williams) culminated in 2024 with the box office smash hit Gladiator II (starring Paul Mescal and Denzel Washington). Performing an incantatory vocal line situating the opening of the film in Northern Africa, the Choir’s power holds centre stage in the initial, epic battle sequence and colours an emotional death sequence in Rome towards the film’s close.
Scott’s notorious exactitude with period detail extends to his requirement for an authentic, credible medieval choral sound on his period soundtracks, which the Choir amply provides. By contrast, on Scott’s science-fiction films (for both Gregson-Williams and his successor Marc Streitenfield) The Bach Choir’s ethereal subtlety provides a genuinely celestial dimension, which harks back strongly to the template for all science-fiction/classical music crossovers: Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) where the use of György Ligeti’s extraordinary Lux Aeterna awakened the world of science-fiction filmmaking to the potential of choirs to transform futuristic pictures of space. It could be said that in cinematic terms, we specialise in depicting both the past and the future.
Star Wars and giant slaying
But it’s not all about the grown-ups. Our latest foray into the sci-fi genre was for none other than Disney’s Star Wars franchise, where we contributed to the soundtrack of the videogame Jedi: Fallen Order in 2019. The Bach Choir has also collaborated on two successful animated releases: The Bee Movie (2007) and Shrek the Third (2007) as well as the live action fairy tale Jack the Giant Slayer (2013) – a somewhat radical updating of Jack and the Beanstalk – for the much-acclaimed composer John Ottman. Ottman combines a semi-pastiche of grand epic fantasy soundtracks with more nuanced pieces like How Do You Do, which features the Choir’s tender mezzo-piano introduction, blending seamlessly with the growing orchestral sound.
One of the hardest working film and television composers today, the Canadian Andrew Lockington, used The Bach Choir for two of his films, the fantasy City of Ember and the uproarious Edgar Rice Burroughs throwback Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, starring the future president of the United States, Dwayne Johnson (AKA The Rock).
Singing in Japanese
2022 featured a very special and moving collaboration with the immense Joe Hisaishi, the composer on such Studio Ghibli classics as My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and Spirited Away (2001). Over two sweltering summer days in St Giles Cripplegate in the Barbican, we sang in Japanese and produced an album of his most celebrated works, adapted for choir and chamber orchestra, to be released in 2023.
While it’s not a ‘Hollywood’ film as such, The Bach Choir commissioned a short film in 2021 called The Promise which uses the piece of the same name composed by Gabriel Jackson for The Choir. This is an ambitious, technically innovative short film made by WeDream Films which acts as a love letter to nature – and the soundtrack was recorded partly remotely and partly in-person during lockdown.
Britten’s War Requiem
Finally, we should not omit one of the highlights of The Bach Choir’s near 150-year history, which was Benjamin Britten’s touchstone 1962 performance of his devastating War Requiem with The Bach Choir and the London Symphony Orchestra. This very recording, with its stark, iconic sleeve, much remastered and endlessly relevant, was taken as the inspiration and soundtrack for the late English director Derek Jarman’s own 1988 film – starring Laurence Olivier in his final acting role – War Requiem. In that sense our collaboration with the cinema started, without our knowing it, over half a century ago.
Julien Allen is a Tenor in The Bach Choir and a film writer. You can find more of his writing here.