Osvaldo Golijov eager to hear ‘the incredible CSO’ in his Megalopolis Suite

Aaron Copland. John Corigliano. Philip Glass. Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Sergei Prokofiev. Dmitri Shostakovich. 

While most film scores are written by full-time movie composers, these men are just some of the well-known concert composers who also have contributed their talents to the medium, with both famous and forgotten results. Reasons for their involvement vary. In some cases, directors were looking for a different kind of sound, and composers were eager to try something new.

Another noted composer who deserves to be on this list is Osvaldo Golijov, whose fourth collaboration with celebrated director Francis Ford Coppola hit theaters on Sept. 27 — a big-budget, sci-fi extravaganza titled “Megalopolis.” The movie debuted in May at the Cannes Film Festival and has divided critics and generated controversy.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra commissioned a 16-17-minute suite drawn from the two or so hours of music that Golijov wrote for the film. Riccardo Muti, the CSO’s Music Director Emeritus for Life, and the ensemble will present the world premiere first at the Krannert Center in Urbana-Champaign on Nov. 7, followed by two concerts in Orchestra Hall, Nov. 8-9. The composer plans to attend the performances in Chicago.

Inspired by the ancient Roman historian Sallust (86-35 BC), Coppola conceived the idea for the sprawling movie in 1977 and has doggedly pursued it off and on since then, ultimately self-financing the $120 million project in 2019 with money raised from the sale of his winery. Golijov first became involved in 2003 when one of the director’s assistants called his home, and the composer’s wife assumed it was one of Golijov’s friends pulling some kind of prank. “I don’t have time for this,” she told the caller. But Coppola was seeking the composer’s mailing address, and he ultimately wrote what Golijov called a “very beautiful, hand-written” letter, which the composer keeps on top of his piano.

The filmmaker invited the composer to Napa to discuss “Megalopolis,” and Golijov spent a week with Coppola at his winery. “It’s a project that has been 40 years in the making,” Golijov said, “and that was one of the periods when he was heavily invested in it. And he had decided that he did not want a Hollywood composer.” After researching a range of contemporary concert composers, Coppola was drawn to Golijov’s works, and he decided to involve him in the film project.

"When Francis asked me to re-create in music the architecture of the Roman Republic, of a noir New York, and of a kiss a thousand feet above ground, the sound in my mind was that of the Chicago Symphony conducted by Maestro Muti,“ Golijov said. ”I am immensely happy now that the dream becomes reality."

Golijov, 63, was born in Argentina to Jewish parents who emigrated from Romania and Ukraine. Inspired in part by his own mixed heritage, his music has often drawn on multiple ethnic and cultural influences and has looked as much to classical music’s past as its present. The composer’s standing was soaring in 2003, when he premiered his first opera, Ainadamar, which is based on the life of Spanish poet-playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. (A new production of the work opened Oct. 15 at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in what will be Golijov’s debut at the important house.)

Because “Megalopolis” kept getting postponed, Golijov wound up collaborating with Coppola on three smaller films — “Youth Without Youth” (2007), “Tetro” (2009) and “Twixt” (2011).

Although the composer had what he called “scraps” of music from his first connections with “Megalopolis,” he did not begin writing extensively for the film until early 2023. He worked on the score virtually every day for a year, starting at 3 a.m. and continuing into the night. “It was an amazing experience,” he said.

A challenge, especially for composers used to creating for the concert stage and having almost total control over their work, are the inevitable compromises that are required in writing for movies. These include cuts to music when a scene has to be shortened or the need for a musical phrase to be lengthened to accommodate an elongated scene.

It helped that Coppola’s father was Carmine Coppola, a noted composer, flutist and songwriter who played in the NBC Symphony Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini. The film director grew up around classical music and has a deep sensitivity to it. “Sometimes movie composers tell me how they have to tailor everything,” Golijov said, “and eventually you do have to tailor, but Francis, his main aim is that you zero into the emotion that the music needs to evoke at a particular moment [in a movie], and then the tailoring is secondary. Of course you have to do the edits, but it’s important that the music has an integrity of its own.”

His collaboration with Francis Ford Coppola has been so fruitful that Golijov calls it one of the experiences that he has cherished most in his life. “I learn every day with him — his fearlessness, his extraordinary vision and his all-encompassing ambition. It’s wonderful.”

Artistic leaders at the CSO were so excited about the potential for Golijov’s score for “Megalopolis” that in 2023, after earlier discussions, they proposed he assemble a suite based on it. “And I said, ‘Let’s do it,’ ” Golijov said. It didn’t hurt, the composer points out, that Muti and Coppola are second cousins.

The four-movement suite, which the composer completed in June, provides a musical overview of the film, which blurs time boundaries and explores the limits and potential of utopian ideals. “Visually speaking, Francis told me how he could name a film that inspired almost every frame in ’Megalopolis,’ ” Golijov writes in his program notes for the work. “Accordingly, he also wanted specific musical references, such as [Miklos] Rosza’s Roman music from [“Ben-Hur”], [Bernard] Herrmann’s music for Hitchcock or Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.”

Golijov, who served as the CSO’s composer-in-residence between 2007 and 2010, said he can’t wait to hear the “incredible orchestra” he got to know so well premiere the Megalopolis Suite. “There is a lot of great, heroic brass music,” he said, “because the movie has two layers. It’s like New York in the near future, but also the Roman Empire, so I think the orchestra will have a blast playing it, because it is pretty epic.”