CSO lets you ‘hear’ ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ in a whole new way

Few if any vintage, black-and-white movies, especially those set against a Christmas backdrop, have managed decade after decade to retain the popularity of Frank Capra’s 1946 classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

As part of its line-up of holiday offerings, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra presents a new way to see, or, perhaps more accurately, hear this beloved tale of a small-town do-gooder who needs the help of his guardian angel as his life seems to crash around him.

In concerts Dec. 9-11, guest conductor Justin Freer and the orchestra will perform an expanded, freshly restored version of Dimitri Tiomkin’s musical score as the film is shown on a big screen in Orchestra Hall.

“So, this an opportunity to hear every bit of music that Dimitri Tiomkin wrote for the film,” said James Fahey, director of programming for the orchestra’s Symphony Center Presents series. “And, in some ways, it makes it a different experience from what many of us [know] who have watched the film so many times and have it almost memorized.”

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Nearly four years ago, Freer founded CineConcerts, a Los Angeles-based firm that has worked with Hollywood studios to present concert screenings of such classic films as “Gladiator,” “The Godfather” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Symphony orchestras across the country have jumped on such presentations as a way to marry sight and sound, reach out to audiences beyond their traditional classical fan base and bolster sagging ticket sales in the process.

The Chicago Symphony established its well-attended CSO at the Movies series in 2004-05 and presented its first screenings of a holiday film last year. It drew near sell-out houses with “Home Alone,” and it hopes to build on that success with “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

Outside of the inclusion of such familiar songs of “Buffalo Gals” and “Auld Lang Syne,” many movie fans, even those have watched Jimmy Stewart run through the snowy streets of Bedford Falls many times, might not recall much about the score. A big reason for that, Freer said, is that Capra deleted about 40 minutes of Tiomkin’s music from the movie, in part because he believed some of it was too dark.

With the support of Paramount Pictures, which controls the rights to the film, Freer, who is also a composer, pored through eight or nine boxes of sheet music and related materials from the studio’s archives. Based on that research, he painstakingly reconstructed the score for the film, returning all the discarded music.

“The music, now restored, is truly glorious,” he said. “There is a lot of more of Dmitri’s originally intended music, and that was the primary reason for doing this [project]. As much as I love the movie, Tiomkin is one of the great [compositional] giants.”

In these upcoming presentations, all the music, including the popular songs, have been removed from the original soundtrack and is instead performed live by the orchestra. “So, the only thing musically,” Freer said, “that you are hearing that is still intact [on the soundtrack] are, for example, the original vocals of ‘Buffalo Gals,’ when it plays on a record player or some of the original Hawaiian slide guitar.”

A highlight will be the participation of 24 members of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, who will perform wordless vocalizations that are part of the score, Christmas carols heard in the background and, of course, the film’s culminating version of “Auld Lang Syne.”

As Freer conducts the performances of the reassembled score, he will have a small monitor next to his music stand showing a special version of the film with markings that help him keep the music and visuals synchronized. These include “punches,” dots of light that flash in the corner of the film on the first beat of each bar of the score.

“You have to make sure the tempos are very, very accurate,” the conductor said, “because if they are off by even two or three beats per minute, within only three bars, it’s quite possible the music would be noticeably off against the film.”

Kyle MacMillan is a local freelance writer.