Pictures at an Exhibition: The Paintings of Bob Peak

by Jon Broxton

On June 14th 2024 IFMCA members Jon Broxton and Dan Goldwasser were among the concert-goers at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles for a special musical tribute to the life and work of legendary artist Bob Peak.

The idea for this concert emerged more than 25 years ago when Robert Townson, the film music producer who spearheaded Varese Sarabande Records for so many years, and who now produces film music concerts and events all over the world, wanted to create a new concert similar to classical composer Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Mussorgsky’s piece was inspired by the work of architect and painter Viktor Hartmann and was first staged at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in June 1874. Townson’s concept was to have ten contemporary film composers create new works inspired by the art of Bob Peak, the artist and illustrator who is considered to be the father of original movie poster artwork.

Now, more than a quarter or a century later, Townson’s vision has come to fruition with Pictures at an Exhibition: The Paintings of Bob Peak. The concert was staged at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, performed by the Los Angeles Film Orchestra, and conducted by the legendary Leonard Slatkin, alongside several featured soloists. The event was co-produced by Robert Townson Productions and the Abu Dhabi Festival, whose founder and artistic director Huda Alkhamis-Kanoo was in attendance.

The first half of the concert was focused on music from films for which Peak designed an iconic poster: the overture from Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the balletic “The Enterprise” from Jerry Goldsmith’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a stirring suite from Bruce Broughton’s western Silverado, the iconic main title march from John Williams’s Superman, two overtures from Frederick Loewe’s screen musicals My Fair Lady and Camelot, and two classical pieces: Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as heard in Apocalypse Now, and Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” as heard in Rollerball, the latter of which was performed as a solo on the Walt Disney Concert Hall’s pipe organ.

However, the main focus of the evening was the second half, which saw the world premiere of ten brand new pieces inspired not by Peak’s film work, but by his vast array of commercial and fine art. An initial statement of Mussorgsky’s Promenade theme performed by pianist Robert Thies segued into the first piece, “Rhapsody for a Golden Age: 1937 Academy Players Directory,” by composer Maria Newman, the daughter of legendary Golden Age composer Alfred Newman. As one might expect Newman’s piece was a celebration of the sound of classic Hollywood, especially the music of her father and his iconic composition “Street Scene”; it moved freely between moments of light soft-shoe-shuffle jazz and languid, almost humorous piano impressions, some of which had a touch of George Gershwin, while often emerging into lush orchestral flourishes.

The second piece was by Oscar-winning composer Mychael Danna and was inspired by “Mother Teresa of Calcutta,” a cover from a 1975 edition of Time Magazine. Danna’s music was gorgeous; moving, evocative, and gently spiritual, and was enhanced enormously by a vocal performance from Iranian singer Azam Ali, who previously worked on soundtracks ranging from Children of Dune to 300. The lyrics were adapted by Danna from a prayer for peace that Mother Teresa herself wrote, and Ali’s voice gave them a wonderful, poignant, cross-cultural resonance as she switched seamlessly between English, Arabic, and Hindi. The whole thing built to a majestic, spine-tingling finale which reminded me greatly of the finale of Danna’s score for The Nativity Story from 2006.

The third piece, by Harry Gregson-Williams, was entitled “Two Girls with Sparklers” and was light, playful, and magically whimsical. Gregson-Williams built his piece around a lovely, dainty three-note motif that gradually built up to a festive finale full of youthful joy. The fourth piece, “Curva Grande,” was by Emirati composer Ihab Darwish and was inspired by a cover from a 1970 issue of Sports Illustrated about international motor racing. Darwish’s music had a powerful sound inspired by the iconic Hollywood notion of ‘sporting heroism’, and was especially notable for the intense driving percussion writing during the piece’s ‘big race’ middle section, and the clever ways the orchestra regularly mimicked the doppler ‘zoom’ effect of a Formula One engine roaring past.

Composer Jeff Beal was asked to write a piece inspired by “New York World’s Fair 1964-65,” and as one would expect considering his background, he wrote a piece steeped in orchestral jazz. Beal’s piece contained rich, aspirational traditional orchestral lines, but then interspersed these with moments of spiky, agitated, expressive jazz, with some notably unusual phrasing in the brass; this created an overall effect of a piece that was full of fascinating tonal conflicts – representing the disparate cultures on display at the fair – before eventually coalescing into something cohesive by the end.

Continuing the sports theme, composer Marco Beltrami’s piece was “The Spirit of Sport: Jack Nicklaus,” inspired by a poster created for the 15^th anniversary of the Special Olympics in 1983. Beltrami’s music was light on its feet, unexpectedly comedic at times, and featured extended passages of pizzicato interrupted by rich brass fanfares. There was some wonderfully rhapsodic piano writing inspired by Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, and some notably outstanding interplay between different parts of the brass section. Similarly, composer Michael Abels’s piece was “Unbound: Jesse Owens,” a tribute to the great African-American athlete who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. Abels’s salute to Owens was powerfully triumphant and saw him developing a two-note motif around the entire orchestra, before building to a heroic, celebratory finale.

Composer Marc Shaiman offered something different with his “A Song About Audrey,” a humorous acknowledgement of the life and work of a Hollywood icon, the enduring legacy of the music that accompanied her on screen – especially ‘Moon River’ – and Shaiman’s own trepidation about how to follow it! Shaiman sang the song himself in his own inimitable style, backed by a bed of lush strings that Henry Mancini himself would have been proud to write.

The penultimate piece was “Golden Eagles” by composer Don Davis, and was a wonderful piece of sweeping Americana filled with majestic, balletic orchestral phrases, and some outstanding and obviously Matrix-esque writing for fading, echoing brass textures in the composer’s iconic style. Finally, the conclusion was Bill Conti’s “The Great Bridge”, inspired by a Peak work that was commissioned to celebrate the 100^th Anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1983. Conti’s tribute to the landmark was solid, stirring, and majestic, with some especially strong thematic writing for brass that had echoes of two of his classic TV themes, North & South, and Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story. The classical strings had a touch of Bach to them, and the whole thing resolved with a resounding flourish.

After the concert concluded there were two surprise presentations which saw conductor Slatkin and the Peak family awarded the Abu Dhabi Festival Award for significant contributions to music and arts; Townson himself was a prior recipient of this same award in 2022, and other prior recipients include Gustavo Dudamel, Quincy Jones, Gabriel Yared, Yo-Yo Ma, and Krzysztof Penderecki.

Speaking personally, I thought the concert was an absolute triumph. The concept of staging a new version of Pictures at an Exhibition, almost 150 years to the day after Mussorgsky staged the original one in Russia, is inspired, and it gave these outstanding film composers the opportunity to explore their own musical personalities free from the limits of meddling movie producers and restrictive scene edits – they could simply be creative and expressive in their own ways. The results were at times breathtakingly good. I was so impressed that I suggested to Townson that he should commission sequels to this every year, with ten new pieces from ten new composers each time; there is enough Peak artwork out there to satisfy this concept almost indefinitely!

But, even if this is ultimately the only concert of this kind, it’s still an outstanding achievement from everyone involved, a magnificent celebration of the life and work of one of the great commercial and poster artists in history. The good news for fans who could not attend in person is that the music was recorded in the studio earlier in the week, and will be released as an album later in 2024; I cannot recommend it highly enough.