麻豆社

Hannah French looks back at representations of period music in film as part of 麻豆社 Radio 3's Sound of Cinema Sunday.

She talks to composer and cellist Peter Gregson about scoring the film A Little Chaos, directed by Alan Rickman, and starring Kate Winslet and Matthias Schoenaerts as two landscape artists who become romantically entangled while building a garden in King Louis XIV's palace at Versailles. Peter explains how he drew on the music of Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, a harpsichordist who worked at the Court of Louis XIV, and who composed much of her music in Versailles.

Jocelyn Pook chats to Hannah about her inspirations when writing the music for the 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, and Joseph Fiennes. She speaks about drawing on Italian, English, and sephardic Jewish music to infuse her score to give it a Sixteenth-Century Italian flavour.

Hannah also looks at how films have included existing music to create a sense of time and place, whether it's adaptations of music by Handel in The Madness of King George, or a more subtle influence in John Barry's Academy Award winning score for the 1968 film A Lion in Winter, set in the Loire Valley in France in 1183.