There is another week of the Astoria Music Festival, but the orchestra finished it’s part of the festival yesterday afternoon. It was a pretty jam-packed week.
The concerts began Thursday evening with a screening of the 1930 silent movie classic “City Girl” (with its exteriors shot in Eastern Oregon, standing in for Minnesota) with a score by John F. Paul, the chair of the music department at Marylhurst College. It’s a 90 minute movie (with a continuous musical score) made by the great German director F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Sunrise) which has some stunningly modern shots in spectacularly clear and evocative black and white cinematography. The score was played by violinist Inés Voglar, violist Joël Belgique, cellist Heather Blackburn, and clarinettist Dunja Marcum. The composer conducted. The score was in a contemporary, tonal language, and not at all in the style of the period, which further increased the sense of modernity and currentness of the film.