Actor Charlie Chaplin died in 1977, and while he is remembered as one of the greatest comedic actors of all time, he was also a musician and composer in his own right, having arranged the music for the majority of his movies.
“He had such an incredible gift for melody,” said violinist and longtime Music in the Mountains performer Philippe Quint. “Chaplin was a prolific composer and wrote pretty much most of the music for his films. And he was also an amateur musician who played violin backwards, cello backwards and piano and he even conducted. He had his own ideas for arrangements, and before he died, he said that he wanted to write an opera and produce a musical – he didn’t get there, but he thought about it.
And when it comes to Chaplin’s music, Quint should know: He’s currently on tour for his new album, “Chaplin’s Smile,” a project three years in the making that includes 13 of Chaplin’s songs arranged for violin and piano. He’ll bring the music to this year’s Music in the Mountains with a performance Thursday at Cortez’s Sunflower Theatre.
Quint said he just sort of fell into the project. He was thinking about working on a new album that included music from films and happened to stumble across “Smile” on YouTube.
“I thought to myself that this would be a great song to include on my future album,” he said. “As I started working on that arrangement, I kept listening to different versions of ‘Smile” on YouTube, including Michael Jackson and Tony Bennett and Nat King Cole and many others, and I think at some point, YouTube threw me to another Chaplin film, ‘Limelight’ and I thought that the melody that I heard was so glorious I thought that could also work for violin, let’s see who wrote it, and I see that Chaplin is again credited as composer.”
He said he searched the internet to see if anyone else had recorded Chaplin’s songs like “Chaplin’s Smile,” and found there was nothing like it out there. Digging a little further, he uncovered 50 or 60 songs from Chaplin’s films and spent the next three years working on arranging those songs into violin- and piano-friendly works.
You’d think that after spending so much time working with the songs, a favorite tune would rise to the top. But with Quint, that’s not the case.
“It’s like a favorite child; who’s going to pick? These 13 arrangements are really 13 children that were created together with my friends’ arrangement, arrangers Charles Coleman and Leon Gurvitch, and my pianist Marta Aznavoorian, also contributed a lot of the time and heart,” he said. “This was a great labor of love that resulted first of all in the CD that was released by Warner Classics, and then I turned it into a show, which the audience in Cortez is going to enjoy.”
While here for Music in the Mountains, Quint will also perform “Sweeping Romance” with Conductor Guillermo Figueroa on July 12 at the Community Concert Hall at Fort Lewis College. The performance will include Mozart’s Symphony No. 36 in C, K. 425, “Linz”; Tchaikovsky’s “Romeo and Juliet, Overture – Fantasy”; and violin Concerto in D, Op. 35.
Quint grew up in Soviet Russia and was not one of those kids who was all about music.
“No, actually, I was kind of the opposite, to be honest with you. I wanted to become a chess champion. I wanted to play Gary Kasparov, or, if you know the chess world, Vladimir Kramnik, I wanted to play them. And then I wanted to become a detective because I started reading Sherlock Holmes. Then I decided I was going to become a soccer player. So, I’ll be honest with you: Violin was not on my mind at all,” he said, adding that growing up in Soviet Russia, the choice to take up violin was not his.
But, he said, he doesn’t regret the road he was put on, and, in fact, being a professional musician has become a lot of fun.
“Yes, especially lately, I would say during the last decade. I can tell you that it started to become fun about a decade ago,” Quint said. “The reason it became fun is because I felt unbelievably comfortable and finally in my skin being on stage and sharing the gift of music with people where I didn’t need to think about the technological aspects of performance. I could just be, like an actor, I could just be in the moment and transform the idea of the composer into the interpretation that I believe it should be.”
Throw in some innovation and exploration, and Quint and his peers – and audiences – are having a blast.
“I’ve also started to become quite an enterprising artist, which I think is very important these days. So, instead of just playing conventional concertos and standard recital programs – it’s wonderful, great music – but I think the world is very anxious to hear something new and something interesting,” he said. “I feel that for classical music, we have a lot of ambassadors that are really trying to push the boundaries and present something else in a new format.
“I think during the next decade, we’re going to see an enormous number of wonderfully creative projects – we’re already seeing that in a lot of instances with all major orchestras sort of subscribing to fun, out-of-the-box projects. That makes me very happy because I think it makes audiences happy.”
katie@durangoherald.com
If you go
What:
Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile,” Philippe Quint, violin; Marta Aznavoorian, piano.
When:
7 p.m. Thursday (July 11).
Where:
Sunflower Theatre, 8 E. Main St., Cortez.
Tickets:
$42, available online at
.
More information:
Visit
. For more information about Quint, visit
.
