Friday Night Is Music Night
Tonight, BBC Radio 2 goes to the BBC Proms as John Wilson and his orchestra celebrate the fabulous musical history of one of the classic film studios - Warner Brothers.
In the early twentieth century, four brothers - Sam, Jack, Harry and Albert Warner - kicked off their movie careers when they clubbed together and bought a film projector and started showing films around the mining towns of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
By 1918 they had opened their first studio on Sunset Boulevard. By 1927 the 'talkies' had arrived and the silent era quietly ended, this was when they made The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson.
Batman, Superman, Blazing Saddles, The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange, 42nd Street, were all products of the Warner Brothers stable. They had it all, adventure, fantasy, horror, comedy, romance and of course the movie musicals including My Fair Lady, Camelot, The Desert Song, Gypsy and The Music Man.
Animation was also a big part of their output, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig being some of the studio’s biggest stars. But there’s always one that got away. In 1936 Harry Warner’s daughter tried to persuade her father to buy the rights to a new novel by Margaret Mitchell called Gone With The Wind, but Harry didn’t believe in the idea and rejected it.
Tonight John Wilson and his orchestra are joined by guests Mikaela Bennett, Louise Dearman, Kate Lindsey, Matthew Ford and the Maida Vale Singers. The evening’s selection of movie themes includes The Seahawk (Erich Korngold) - a swashbuckling adventure made in 1940 with Errol Flynn, The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (Max Steiner) from 1948 with Humphrey Bogart, Dimitri Tiomkin’s Oscar winning score for The Old Man And The Sea - the 1958 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s novella which starred Spencer Tracy, Now Voyager (Max Steiner) that brought us the on screen charisma of Bette Davis and Paul Henreid, along with Alex North’s score for A Street Car Named Desire with Vivien Leigh and Marlon Brando. And as an encore the evening ends with Harry’s Wondrous World (John Williams) from the Harry Potter film series.
- Presenter: Ken Bruce and John Wilson
- Producer: Bridget Apps for BBC Radio 2
Prom first broadcast on 9th August from Royal Albert Hall, London.
Publicity contact: SH8
