Newspaper Article

Rock's secret desire

Plush, Vincent

2002

Overview

On May 15, 1970, at a UCLA concert, Zubin Mehta directed the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert version of the film about life on the road with the Mothers of Invention. [Frank Zappa]'s description is pure composer-speak: \"200 Motels is a surrealistic documentary, but it might also be helpful to think of the overall shape of the film in the same way you might think of the shape of a piece of orchestral music, with leitmotifs, harmonic transpositions, slightly altered repetitions, cadences, atonal areas, counterpoint, polyrhythmic textures, onomatopoeic imitations, etc.\" Perhaps the earliest Australian collaboration was Peter Sculthorpe's Love 200, which assembled the folksinger Jeannie Lewis, the rock group Tully and the Sydney Symphony for the last night of the 1970 Sydney Proms. From the mid-1980s, rock musicians such as Elvis Costello tentatively approached such classical artists as the Brodsky Quartet and, in 2001, soprano Anne Sophie Van Otter. THE renowned keyboard player of Deep Purple, Jon Lord, now 60, studied piano at the Royal Academy, and composed his 55-minute Concerto for a concert in Royal Albert Hall on September 24, 1969. After two concerts in the Hollywood Bowl in August 1970, the score disappeared. A young Dutch musician, Marco de Goeij, spent two years transcribing the work from recordings.

• Publisher: Nationwide News Pty Ltd
• Subject: Varese, Edgar / Zappa, Frank