Michael Laurence Nyman, CBE is an English composer, pianist, librettist, musicologist, and filmmaker. He is known for numerous film scores, and his multi-platinum soundtrack album to Jane Campion's The Piano. He has written a number of operas, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat; Letters, Riddles and Writs; Noises, Sounds & Sweet Airs; Facing Goya; Man and Boy: Dada; Love Counts; and Sparkie: Cage and Beyond. He has written six concerti, five string quartets, and many other chamber works, many for his Michael Nyman Band. He is also a performing pianist. Nyman prefers to write opera over other forms of music.
Southwold is a seaside town and civil parish on the North Sea, in the East Suffolk district, in the county of Suffolk, England. It lies at the mouth of the River Blyth in the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, 11 miles (18 km) south of Lowestoft, 29 miles (47 km) north-east of Ipswich and 97 miles (156 km) north-east of London, within the parliamentary constituency of Suffolk Coastal. At the 2021 Census, the population was 950.
The Falls is a 1980 film directed by Peter Greenaway. It was Greenaway's first feature-length film after many years making shorts. It does not have a traditional dramatic narrative; it takes the form of a mock documentary in 92 short parts.
Creepshow is a 1982 American horror comedy anthology film directed by George A. Romero and written by Stephen King, making this film his screenwriting debut. The film's ensemble cast includes Hal Holbrook, Adrienne Barbeau, Fritz Weaver, Leslie Nielsen, Carrie Nye, E. G. Marshall, Viveca Lindfors, Ted Danson and Ed Harris, as well as King himself. The film was primarily shot on location in Pittsburgh and its suburbs, including Monroeville, where Romero leased an old boys' academy to build extensive sets for the film.
Yann Pierre Tiersen is a French Breton musician and composer. His musical career is split between studio recordings, music collaborations, and film soundtracks songwriting. His music incorporates a large variety of classical and contemporary instruments, primarily the electric guitar, the piano, synthesisers, and the violin, but he also includes instruments such as the melodica, xylophone, toy piano, harpsichord, piano accordion, and even a typewriter.
The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra in E♭ major, K. 364 (320d), was written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
The Tulse Luper Suitcases is a multimedia project by film maker and artist Peter Greenaway, initially intended to comprise four films, a 16-episode TV series, and 92 DVDs, as well as websites, CD-ROMs and books. The project documented the imagined life of a fictional character called Tulse Luper.
Prospero's Books is a 1991 British avant-garde film adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest, written and directed by Peter Greenaway. Sir John Gielgud plays Prospero, the protagonist who provides the off-screen narration and the voices to the other story characters. As noted by Peter Conrad in The New York Times on 17 November 1991, Greenaway intended the film “as an homage to the actor and to his 'mastery of illusion.' In the film, Prospero is Shakespeare, and having rehearsed the action inside his head, speaking the lines of all the other characters, he concludes the film by sitting down to write The Tempest.”
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is a 1989 crime drama art film written and directed by Peter Greenaway, starring Richard Bohringer, Michael Gambon, Helen Mirren and Alan Howard in the title roles. An international co-production of the United Kingdom and France, the film's graphic violence and nude scenes, as well as its lavish cinematography and formalism, were noted at the time of its release.
A video synthesizer is a device that electronically creates a video signal. A video synthesizer is able to generate a variety of visual material without camera input through the use of internal video pattern generators. It can also accept and "clean up and enhance" or "distort" live television camera imagery. The synthesizer creates a wide range of imagery through purely electronic manipulations. This imagery is visible within the output video signal when this signal is displayed. The output video signal can be viewed on a wide range of conventional video equipment, such as TV monitors, theater video projectors, computer displays, etc.
Funny Games is a 2007 satirical psychological thriller film written and directed by Michael Haneke. The film is a shot-for-shot remake of his own 1997 film of the same title, albeit in English and set in the United States with different actors; Naomi Watts, Tim Roth, Michael Pitt, and Brady Corbet star in the main roles. Like the original, the film follows an affluent family as they are captured and tortured by two young criminals on their vacation.
The Ice Storm is a 1997 American independent drama film directed by Ang Lee and written by James Schamus. Based on Rick Moody's 1994 novel of the same name and set during Thanksgiving 1973 in New Canaan, Connecticut, the film features an ensemble cast of Kevin Kline, Joan Allen, Tobey Maguire, Christina Ricci, Elijah Wood, Katie Holmes, Glenn Fitzgerald, Jamey Sheridan and Sigourney Weaver as two neighbouring, dysfunctional upper-class families seeking escapism through alcohol, adultery, and sexual experimentation.
The Michael Nyman Band, formerly known as the Campiello Band, is a group formed as a street band for a 1976 production of Carlo Goldoni's 1756 play, Il Campiello directed by Bill Bryden at the Old Vic. The band did not wish to break up after the production ended, so its director, Michael Nyman, began composing music for the group to perform, beginning with "In Re Don Giovanni", written in 1977. Originally made up of old instruments such as rebecs, sackbuts and shawms alongside more modern instruments like the banjo and saxophone to produce as loud a sound as possible without amplification, it later switched to a fully amplified line-up of string quartet, double bass, clarinet, three saxophones, horn, trumpet, bass trombone, bass guitar, and piano. This lineup has been variously altered and augmented for some works.
Third is the third studio album by the English band Portishead. It was released on 28 April 2008 in the United Kingdom by Island Records and a day later in the United States by Mercury Records. Portishead's first studio album in eleven years, Third moved away from the trip hop style they had popularised, incorporating influences such as krautrock, surf rock, doo wop and the film soundtracks of John Carpenter.
Man on Wire is a 2008 documentary film directed by James Marsh. The film chronicles Philippe Petit's 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of New York's World Trade Center. It is based on Petit's 2002 book, To Reach the Clouds, released in paperback with the title Man on Wire. The title of the film is taken from the police report that led to the arrest of Petit, whose performance lasted for almost an hour. The film is crafted like a heist film, presenting rare footage of the preparations for the event and still photographs of the walk, alongside re-enactments and present-day interviews with the participants, including Barry Greenhouse, an insurance executive who served as the inside man.
The Essential Michael Nyman Band is a studio album featuring a collection of music by Michael Nyman written for the films of Peter Greenaway and newly performed by the Michael Nyman Band. It is the seventeenth album release by Nyman. The album features liner notes by Annette Morreau, who describes the album as "a summation and digest of ten years of progress in the performance of music by a composer -- a composer with whom, so evidently, a group of friends and expert musicians intimately identify their total commitment, virtuosity, and joyous enthusiasm."
Mozart 252 is a 2008 album by Michael Nyman with the Michael Nyman Band, Hilary Summers, and Andrew Slater, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birth. Although "Revisiting the Don," one of only two newly written works on the album, was commissioned and performed in 2006, the album's title is a joke on its lateness as an album, released 252 years after Mozart's birth. The album also includes "In Re Don Giovanni," Nyman's first composition for the band, which is based on the first fifteen bars of "Madamina, il catalogo è questo" from Don Giovanni, six selections from Peter Greenaway's film, Drowning by Numbers, in which he was instructed to base the music on the slow movement of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante K. 364, and two duets and an aria from Nyman's television opera, Letters, Riddles and Writs, in this recording featuring bass Andrew Slater as Leopold Mozart and contralto Hilary Summers as Wolfgang.
The Very Best of Michael Nyman: Film Music 1980–2001 is a compilation album film music by Michael Nyman. It was released on November 6, 2001 by Virgin Records. It including three previously unreleased tracks and one from the limited release, La Traversée de Paris. Some tracks are from the original soundtracks, while others are from pre-existing rerecordings such as The Essential Michael Nyman Band and Live.
The Composer's Cut Series Vol. II: Nyman/Greenaway Revisited is the second in a series of albums, all released on the same day, by Michael Nyman to feature concert versions of film scores, in this case, films of Peter Greenaway, and his 52nd release overall. The album is similar to The Essential Michael Nyman Band, although a number of tracks are on only one album or the other. In spite of being recorded in 1992, with the same lineup, Memorial is not the same performance as the one that appears on The Essential Michael Nyman Band or After Extra Time, which was recorded in Tokyo. This performance was recorded in London and is slightly less aggressively performed.
Simple Passion is a 2020 erotic drama film written and directed by Danielle Arbid, based on the 1992 autobiographical novel of the same name by Annie Ernaux. The film stars Laetitia Dosch and Sergei Polunin, with Lou-Teymour Thion, Caroline Ducey, Grégoire Colin and Slimane Dazi. The plot follows a divorced university professor (Dosch) who begins an intense affair with a younger, married diplomat (Polunin).
