MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca is a historical mystery-drama directed and co-written by Puerto Rican filmmaker Marcos Zurinaga, based principally on Ian Gibson’s books about the life and murder of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca, a contemporary of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí who was assassinated by Nationalist forces at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Rather than presenting a conventional biography, the film approaches Lorca’s death through the investigation of Ricardo, played by Esai Morales, a journalist who returns to Franco-era Spain years after encountering the poet as a boy. His attempt to discover what happened to Lorca gradually pulls him into a web of memory, political repression, personal guilt, and competing versions of history. Andy García plays Lorca, with Edward James Olmos, Jeroen Krabbé, Miguel Ferrer, and Giancarlo Giannini among the supporting cast.

The film was a passion project for Zurinaga and had an unusually difficult road to the screen. The director began developing the idea around 1990 after reading Gibson’s biography of Lorca, and initially envisioned Raúl Juliá in the title role. Juliá, Edward James Olmos, Andy García, Rubén Blades, and others believed that the film could potentially be the first in a series centered on major Latino cultural figures, but Juliá died before the Lorca project could be realized. Zurinaga nevertheless persisted for years, eventually raising a reported $12 million through a mixture of outside financing and considerable personal risk. García ultimately took the role of Lorca and dedicated his performance to Juliá.

The score for The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca was written by Mark McKenzie, who in 1996 was still much better known within Hollywood as an elite orchestrator for composers like Bruce Broughton, John Barry, Danny Elfman, Randy Edelman, Alan Silvestri, and others than as a prominent composer in his own right. Although he had previously worked on films such as Frank and Jesse, Mi Familia, and Dr Jekyll and Ms Hyde – all of which featured outstanding scores – for some reason McKenzie found it difficult to break through; this would be his last score for three years, until he was hired to compose the music for the Hallmark TV movie Durango in 1999.

As such, The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca is important because it offered McKenzie a rare opportunity to write on a genuinely expansive dramatic canvas, and he responded with one of the richest and most emotionally direct scores of his career. His stated intention was to capture the pathos, romance, passion, drama, and recurring obsession with death found in Lorca’s poetry, and the music embraces those qualities without reservation. This is lush, openly melodic film music, built around several recurring themes and colored with Spanish elements, while also incorporating some excellent moments of intense action.

The centerpiece of the score is “For Love of a Poet,” the five-minute overture, which remains one of the most magnificent individual pieces of McKenzie’s career. The piece establishes the score’s emotional world immediately through its principal theme, which combines the recurring ideas associated with Lorca and Ricardo. Beginning in an atmosphere of solemn expectation with a gorgeous melody for solo piano, and moving through a brief interlude for woodwinds, it eventually unleashes a bank of broad, yearning strings in that classic Mark McKenzie spine-tingling way. The theme is truly magnificent; it captures the inherent romance of Lorca’s poetry, then balances that against his personal life, which encompassed deeply held political beliefs, latent homosexuality, and his eventual death in the most tragic of circumstances. The fact that McKenzie is able to capture all this depth of emotion in his music, with such exquisite beauty, melodic strength, and compositional craft, is remarkable.

The “Main Title” deepens the Spanish identity of the score through the introduction of Manolo Segura’s raw vocal presence, which becomes almost an embodiment of death itself. Segura is one of the world’s great flamenco vocalists, and his massive, startling ululations combine excellently with the acoustic guitar performances by Grant Geissman. “Ricardo’s Theme” is a gentler exploration of the specific theme for that character, with tender pianos, warm strings, and expressive guitars carrying a sense of wistful introspection that contrasts beautifully with the more sweeping Lorca material.

Most of the rest of the score is, essentially, a series of variations on those two main themes for Lorca and Ricardo. McKenzie alters the orchestration, shifts the emotional emphasis, and blends his orchestra with Segura’s voice and Geissman’s guitar in numerous cues. I especially like the wonderfully expressive guitars in “Trapped Inside My Memories,” the appealing oboe-led warmth of “I Want to Feel Your Work,” the poignantly moving “Elegy for Jorge,” and the tender romance of “Marie Eugenia’s Theme.”

Later, “I Sing His Elegance” allows McKenzie’s long-lined string writing to blossom with almost concert-hall grandeur and a massive, epic sweep; this approach continues into the subsequent “Five in the Shadow of the Afternoon,” which has a notably increased use of brass. The stirring reprise that comes later in “Butterfly of Your Kiss” is similarly gorgeous.

However, once in a while, McKenzie moves sideways and presents several outstanding action and suspense sequences that underscore both Lorca’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War and the occasionally dangerous circumstances Ricardo encounters while trying to uncover the truth about Lorca’s fate. McKenzie is not especially well known for his action music, but this score, more than most others in his filmography, indicates that he has the capacity to excel in that arena too. There are a lot of little stylistic and compositional touches here that can be heard in the action music of composers like James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, Bruce Broughton, and Alan Silvestri, which of course makes sense considering how often McKenzie provided orchestrations for them; it naturally makes one wonder whether he influenced their styles, whether they influenced his, or whether it was a little bit of both. Whatever the case, the action music here is outstanding.

The stark intensity of “A Thunderstorm is Brewing” is superb, and the cue has a great deal in common with Horner’s most muscular 1990s action material, including the pounding pianos from scores like The Pelican Brief and the snare-drum propulsion of scores like Legends of the Fall and Apollo 13. “Blood of a Poet” contains some of the score’s most anguished writing, combining orchestral dissonances, rumbling pianos, and flamenco voices to offer a palpable sense of impending doom. “The Crumbling Sound of Daisies” explores the same sonic world, but brings the guitars more prominently into play.

The brilliant “I Invented Some Wings for Flying” features flashing strings reminiscent of Jerry Goldsmith’s rejected score for Judge Dredd, turns the flamenco guitars into thunderous percussion, and cleverly incorporates handclaps and foot-stomps for the same purpose several years before James Horner did something similar on The Mask of Zorro, before finally erupting into powerful militaristic bombast. “Five by All Clocks in the Afternoon” is an exercise in relentless tension and encroaching danger, with those flashing strings and pounding pianos this time in competition with an array of terrifically beefy brass pulses performing fragments of the main theme.

The brutal “Death Calling” brings Segura’s voice back into the foreground, making the score’s fatalistic undercurrent explicit and giving Lorca’s demise at the hands of Nationalist forces an appropriate amount of tragic intensity. At times Segura’s vocal stylings remind me of the Native American chants heard in John Barry’s Dances With Wolves and James Horner’s Thunderheart (among others); there is a sense of deep spirituality to them that feels quite palpable, if not entirely intentional. The final cue, “Where Is My Moon? (Lorca Elegy),” is one of McKenzie’s most affecting pieces, gathering the sorrow of the preceding cues into a deeply lyrical lament for the fate of one of Spain’s most celebrated literary giants. The album then concludes with the magnificent ten-minute “Federico Garcia Lorca Orchestral Suite,” which revisits all the score’s principal ideas in expansive form and gives the album the grand, emotionally cathartic conclusion it deserves.

To be fair, there are moments when the thematic repetition in The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca feels a little too noticeable, which may result in some frustration for those who prefer greater melodic variety in their scores. Furthermore, the recording itself sometimes reveals the rushed circumstances under which it was made – McKenzie reportedly had only a few weeks to prepare the score, which was recorded over three days using three different groups of musicians – but these are minor concerns. For me, the overwhelming impression left by this score is of a composer seizing a rare opportunity to write music for something rich, dramatic, and meaningful, and pouring everything he had into it.

The Disappearance of Garcia Lorca is passionate, melodramatic in the best sense, unmistakably Spanish in flavor without becoming pastiche, and full of the soaring melodic writing that would become McKenzie’s signature. It remains one of the great overlooked scores of the 1990s, and one of the clearest early demonstrations that McKenzie deserved far more high-profile composing assignments than Hollywood ultimately gave him.

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Track Listing:

• For Love of a Poet (5:24)
• Main Title (3:16)
• Ricardo’s Theme (:59)
• Trapped Inside My Memories (1:02)
• I Want to Feel Your Work (1:36)
• A Thunderstorm is Brewing (3:11)
• Elegy for Jorge (2:04)
• Blood of a Poet (3:31)
• Marie Eugenia’s Theme (:56)
• The Crumbling Sound of Daisies (1:41)
• A Coffin of Wheels was his Bed (1:24)
• I Invented Some Wings for Flying (2:31)
• I Sing His Elegance (3:09)
• Five in the Shadow of the Afternoon (1:38)
• Five by All Clocks in the Afternoon (3:16)
• Butterfly of Your Kiss (2:32)
• Death Calling (2:23)
• Where Is My Moon? (Lorca Elegy) (3:54)
• Federico Garcia Lorca Orchestral Suite (10:40)

Running Time: 55 minutes 16 seconds

Intrada Records MAF-7080 (1996)

Music composed and conducted by Mark McKenzie. Orchestrations by Mark McKenzie and Patrick Russ. Featured musical soloist Grant Geissman. Special vocal performances by Manolo Segura. Recorded and mixed by John Richards. Edited by Dick Bernstein. Album produced by Mark McKenzie.