LAURENCE ROSENTHAL

Film Fest Gent proudly presents Laurence Rosenthal: Music for Film and Television, the film festival’s 2023 album with all-new studio recordings of selected scores by Laurence Rosenthal, performed by the Brussels Philharmonic and conducted by Film Fest Gent music director Dirk Brossé.

American composer Laurence Rosenthal is one of the giants of film, television and theatre music. His career in film and television composition, which began in the 1950s, spans no less than six decades and has resulted in numerous accolades and awards, including two Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations, seven Emmy Awards (with an additional six nominations) and the World Soundtrack Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. Highly regarded among film music critics and composers alike, Laurence Rosenthal is an immensely talented and versatile composer, who has enhanced films and television series time and again with superbly crafted scores that are both intellectually captivating and emotionally moving.

For this historic album, the first rerecording entirely devoted to Laurence Rosenthal’s oeuvre, most of the suites have been newly created – in collaboration with the composer and with WSA Advisory Board member Robert Townson – based on the original manuscripts in the composer’s archive. Highlights include substantial suites from Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker, the Oscar-nominated score for Becket, the composer’s epic western score for The Return of a Man Called Horse, the Saturn Award-nominated score for Clash of the Titans and the miniseries Mussolini: The Untold Story. A number of pieces have never been heard on an album before, namely the suite from the documentary Michelangelo: The Last Giant, which won the composer his very first Emmy Award, the revised version of the “Main Title” from Requiem for a Heavyweight and the suite from Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies. The latter is a television film continuing on from George Lucas’s series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, for which Laurence Rosenthal wrote the acclaimed main theme. The twin cherries on the cake are a revision of the finale from A Raisin in the Sun and a full orchestration of the famous theme from Fantasy Island, newly arranged by the composer especially for this album.

Released during the 50th anniversary edition of Film Fest Gent in October 2023 and licensed to Silva Screen Records, the album Laurence Rosenthal: Music for Film and Television is the 18th title in Film Fest Gent’s continuing series of annual film music albums, containing new studio recordings with Brussels Philharmonic and Dirk Brossé that give some of the world’s greatest scores an extended afterlife beyond the films. Previous recordings feature the work of Craig Armstrong, Angelo Badalamenti, Marco Beltrami, Terence Blanchard, Carter Burwell, Mychael Danna, Cliff Martinez, Mark Isham, Alan Silvestri, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Shigeru Umebayashi and Gabriel Yared.