MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer, arranger, orchestrator and conductor Irwin Kostal died ten years ago today, on November 23, 1994, in Studio City, California, at the age of 83, following a heart attack.

One of the great musical craftsmen of the Hollywood musical, Kostal’s career encompassed Broadway, television and cinema, and included two Academy Awards for his work on West Side Story and The Sound of Music. He was also closely associated with Walt Disney, supervising the music for several of the studio’s most celebrated live-action musicals.

Kostal was born in Chicago, Illinois, on October 1, 1911, into a Czech-American family. He began playing piano as a child but was largely self-taught, learning orchestration by studying the scores of Beethoven, Debussy and other composers in his local library. After working as a dance-band musician in Chicago, he became an arranger for the NBC radio program Design for Listening. He moved to New York in 1946 and subsequently worked on television programs including Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and The Garry Moore Show.

By the late 1950s Kostal had become one of Broadway’s leading orchestrators. His most important early assignment was Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957), whose complex mixture of jazz, Latin rhythms, symphonic writing and Broadway song was orchestrated by Kostal and Sid Ramin. He also worked on shows including Fiorello! and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

When West Side Story reached the screen in 1961, Kostal joined Saul Chaplin, Johnny Green and Ramin in adapting Bernstein’s music for the much larger resources of the film orchestra. The result retained the rhythmic ferocity of the stage score while giving numbers such as “Tonight,” “America,” “Maria” and the climactic ballet sequences an enormous cinematic sweep. The four men shared the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, one of ten Oscars won by the film.

That success brought Kostal to the attention of Walt Disney and songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman, who recruited him to supervise, arrange and conduct the music for Mary Poppins (1964). Kostal’s elaborate orchestrations helped give songs such as “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Jolly Holiday,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” and “Feed the Birds” their distinctive combination of Edwardian charm and Hollywood spectacle. Although the Sherman brothers won Oscars for their original score and “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” Kostal received a separate nomination for his adaptation and treatment of the music.

An even greater triumph followed with Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965). Kostal adapted and conducted Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Broadway score for the screen, expanding its orchestral palette while remaining faithful to the character of the original songs. The film became one of the most successful musicals ever made, and Kostal received his second Academy Award for its musical adaptation.

Kostal subsequently became particularly associated with large-scale family musicals. He worked with the Sherman brothers again on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Charlotte’s Web (1973), The Magic of Lassie (1978) and Disney’s Pete’s Dragon (1977). His work on Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Pete’s Dragon brought further Academy Award nominations, while other film assignments included Half a Sixpence and the international production The Blue Bird.

In 1982 Kostal undertook the unusual task of conducting a new digital recording of Leopold Stokowski’s music for Disney’s Fantasia, carefully recreating the original arrangements while taking advantage of modern recording technology. The following year he returned to Disney to compose and conduct the music for the animated short Mickey’s Christmas Carol.

Kostal continued working in film, theatre and television and was serving as president of the American Society of Music Arrangers and Composers at the time of his death. He was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 2004.