Search - Elliott Goldenthal :: Green Bird (2000 Original Broadway Cast)

The fantasy-cum-satire style of 18th-century playwright and fabulist Carlo Gozzi has inspired composers as diverse as Prokofiev (The Love for Three Oranges) and Puccini (Turandot). More recently, it's also captured the imagination of celebrated, polymorphous director Julie Taymor, who used her trademark panoply of masks and puppets (familiar from The Lion King) to stage this allegorical fairy tale of a royal family's rite of passage after being separated by an evil grandmother. The Green Bird marks another in a series of collaborations--including the film Titus--between Taymor and partner Elliot Goldenthal, and this recording hails from the show's Broadway premiere in the spring of 2000 (it had first been introduced in 1996). The label "original Broadway cast recording" may actually be somewhat misleading, since The Green Bird is not a musical but a play with incidental music, which is presented here as a sort of suite (under 40 minutes in length) divided into many small episodes--rather like a film score. Though he's best known for his film music, Goldenthal is a highly versatile composer with an especially imaginative gift for establishing atmosphere and tone, and for wringing exquisite varieties of color from the pit (he also did the orchestrations here)--whether in the glacial harmonies depicting a statue that walks or in the witty montage of eclectic sources. Most of the music here is instrumental (written for delightful chamber combinations of violin, woodwind, keyboard, and percussion, but with some exotic touches), and there are also occasional vocals (one represents singing apples). But for all its effectiveness, you can't escape the sense that the production's contemporary updating of commedia dell'arte traditions and striking visuals, which this music was written to accompany, are an essential part of the experience that Taymor and company are attempting to convey with their Green Bird. --Thomas May