Top scoring for the silver screen

From a family steeped in classical music, composer Lalo Schifrin’s film scores are inextricably linked to their screenplays, and he is bringing the magic of ‘Mission Impossible’ and ‘Bullitt’ to an Irish audience

AT THE AGE OF 78, there aren't many musical "firsts" left for Lalo Schifrin. The Argentine pianist and composer has won four Grammy awards and six Oscar nominations. He has been commissioned by everyone from Steinway to the Sultan of Oman via the Austrian government, and has been writing music for video games and to accompany a graphic novel called Spooks. He has also composed scores for more than 100 movies and TV programmes, among them The Amityville Horror, Bullitt, Enter the Dragon, The Cincinnati Kidand Dirty Harry. His, too, is that instantly recognisable theme from Mission Impossible– the one with the "burning fuse". Musically, he has done it all. But he has never, he tells me in his throaty, heavily Spanish-accented rasp, been to Ireland.

That will all change on February 7th, when he will conduct and perform with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra – and the programme for the evening is a film-buff's dream. "Lemme see," he says. "I'm gonna do the theme from Bullitt. You know Bullitt, huh? And I have an Enter the Dragon suite that I wrote for symphony concert. And I did arrangements for a suite of The Cotton Club, a movie that was directed by Francis Coppola. It was about the life of musicians in the 1930s and 1940s. Duke Ellington was in the movie, so I wrote Echoes of Duke Ellington."

Immersive 3D, eat your heart out. Here's a chance to sit right in the middle of it all as the orchestra recreates Schifrin's high-gloss jazz sound live, with the man himself giving it plenty of welly on the piano. "I thought the best way to connect with a Dublin audience would be to do some classic film music" he explains – as if he needed an excuse. "Not only my music, but music of some of the great masters of film and television." The latter, he says, include Casablancaand The Third Man. He hasn't mentioned Mission Impossible. Presumably it will feature somewhere on the night? Schifrin chortles. "Well, you know, I didn't want to put it in the programme – so I put it as an encore. Since you ask now, I'm telling you."

With his world-weary Jewish face and shoulder-length white hair – think Einstein on a good hair day – Schifrin could have come straight out of the pages of an AB Yehoshua novel. “My father Luis was the concert master of the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, and his brother Roberto was the first cello of the orchestra,” he says. “And from my mother’s side also – her brothers were professional musicians.” With all those strings in the family, why did he choose the piano? “I didn’t. My father chose it for me. I was five, six years old; I didn’t know what to choose at the time.” He took to it pretty sharpish, however, and studied with Daniel Barenboim’s father, no less. “Yeah, Enrique Barenboim. He was a friend of my father, and they used to play chamber music together.”

Something in the young Schifrin, however, rebelled against a "strictly ballroom" classical career. "When I was maybe five or six years old, I went to see a horror movie," he recalls. "It was Frankensteinor Dracula– one of those – and nobody in my family wanted to take me, because they didn't like those movies. So my maternal grandmother . . . she was amazing. And just to be with me, and buy me chocolates and things, she took me.

“That was a Saturday. On the next Monday, when I went to school I told my classmates, ‘You know what? That movie I saw over the weekend – if it had had no music, it wouldn’t have been so scary’. Most kids would be following the different things that happen, and waiting for the next time the monster arrives. But I was paying attention to the music.”

At the age of 20 he won a scholarship to the Paris Conservatoire. “I stayed there for four years,” he says. “I was leading a double life because in the day I was in the conservatory, where one of my teachers was Olivier Messiaen. And at night I was playing jazz with some of the best musicians in Paris. Americans, French, Belgians. So I was not sleeping. I had to develop insomnia.”

His studies completed, Schifrin went back to Buenos Aires and set up his own big band. One night a jazz trumpeter turned up at a gig, heard him play and – on the spot – offered him a job as a pianist and arranger. His name? Dizzy Gillespie. "He's the one who brought me here to the States. I stayed with Dizzy for several years, and played all over the world with his band." Schifrin's first big hit as a composer was the piece Gillespiana, which sold 1 million copies and brought the young Argentine to the attention of the all-powerful MGM studios.

The rest is, pretty much, history. Yet despite his golden career as a composer of scores for the silver screen, Schifrin describes himself, not as a film composer, but simply as a composer. In a practical sense, is there a difference? "Well, the only difference is that when you're writing for a film you have to write for that film. But when I have commissions to write other kinds of music which is not film music, I still have to have the same discipline, the same formal organisation of sound. There is a difference, yes. But there is a similarity too."

Some of his commissions have been so exotic, they might well be taken from the plot of an adventure film. The Steinway Foundation commissioned his second piano concerto, which was premiered by Cristina Ortiz in Washington in 1992. In 1993, he produced his Lil'Uokalani Symphonyin honour of the last monarch of Hawaii; in 2003 it was Symphonic Impressions of Oman, written for the Sultan and recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. Last year, at the invitation of the Austrian government, he wrote a piece to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the death of Franz Josef Haydn. How did he approach that one?

"That's a good question," he says. "There's a sonata of Haydn, No 4 in G minor. I took a motif – just one motif that keeps coming back – and in writing my piece that motif keeps recurring. I call it Elegy and Meditation."

With so many premieres, recordings and live concerts, you'd think it would be impossible to single out one which he remembers with more affection than the rest. Without hesitation, however, Schifrin plumps for the 1988 performance of his cantata Cantos Aztecas (Songs of the Aztecs)with Placido Domingo and the Philharmonic Orchestra of Mexico at the spectacular Pyramid of the Moon in the middle of the Mexican jungle. "It was a very emotional thing," he says. "I had to fight very hard to get it performed. There were many logistical problems. We had to transport the orchestra from Mexico to Teotihuacán. We got finally American Express. That evening cost $2 million. The Hollywood Bowl people were involved. They built a theatre outdoors, and there was about 20,000 people there.

You can see how it might make a good tagline for a lifetime of musical endeavour.

Lalo Schifrin will play piano and conduct the RTÉ Concert Orchestra at the National Concert Hall on Sunday, February 7th, at 8pm