For the second time in less than a year, Tucson Symphony Orchestra and Fox Tucson Theatre are teaming up to bring sound to a Charlie Chaplin silent film.
American-Canadian conductor Julian Pellicano will lead the orchestra on Sunday, Jan. 5, in performing Chaplin’s soundtrack to his 1925 silent film “The Gold Rush.” Chaplin didn’t add music or narration to the film until 1942, and that version received Academy Award nominations for best music score and best recording.
“In 1942, Charlie Chaplin wrote music for many of his films from the 1920s,” Pellicano said during a phone call Monday from his home in Toronto, Canada. “He was kind of a Renaissance man and in addition to being an actor and director and screenwriter, he was also an amateur musician, a quite good amateur musician.”
Chaplin couldn’t read music, but he knew how to improvise, and with help from some composer and arranger friends, he orchestrated and recorded music for his 1920s silent films then re-released them in an updated 1940s format, Pellicano said.
Julian Pellicano will lead the Tucson Symphony Orchestra on Sunday in performing the soundtrack of Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 silent film “The Gold Rush.”
Pellicano, who was born in New York and has lived in Canada for nearly a dozen years, has been conducting live-to-film performances since 2013, when the genre was starting to catch on. Pellicano did a number of live-to-film performances while he was on the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra conducting staff, which led to invites to do the film concerts with other orchestras.
To date he’s done dozens of performances, including “Star Wars,” “Wizard of Oz” and “Casablanca” as well as Chaplin films, but this will be only his second time doing “The Gold Rush.”
“The music is very indicative of ... the 1920s. There is a lot of dance music in this film and so you’re gonna hear waltzes and little foxtrots,” Pellicano said. “It sounds very much like operatic music that would’ve been written in the 1920s.”
This is the second collaboration between the historic downtown theater and the TSO since last April, when the orchestra performed the Chaplin-composed soundtrack for his 1931 film “City Lights.”
Tucson Symphony Orchestra is collaborating with Fox Tucson Theatre to perform the soundtrack to Charlie Chaplin’s silent film “The Gold Rush.”
Chaplin wrote, directed and starred in “The Gold Rush,” which was inspired by the late 19th-century Klondike Gold Rush and the mid-19th-century Donner Party expedition, when a group of 87 pioneers heading from the Midwest to California were forced to spend the winter in the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains. The 47 survivors resorted to cannibalism to survive.
In Chaplin’s version, his Little Tramp character is heading north to the Klondike Gold Rush when he becomes trapped in a blizzard. He’s forced to share a small cabin with a successful prospector and a fugitive. When the trio are able to leave the cabin, the prospector enlists Little Tramp’s help in finding his claim.
One of the film’s most iconic scenes, stolen from the Donner Party, has Chaplin preparing his shoe for Thanksgiving dinner, twirling the shoestrings around a fork like spaghetti and picking the nails out of his shoe like chicken bones. The Donner Party survivors reportedly ate their shoes out of desperation.
Sunday’s performance begins at 2 p.m. at the Fox, 17 W. Congress St. Tickets start at $27.50 through foxtucson.com.
