- Russell Currie is recognised as a versatile composer, having written music for films, opera/music theatre, chamber music and dance. His music is rich in dramatic orchestral colour with direct emotional lyrical lines that discover an effective balance between dissonance and clarifying tonality. His works have been sponsored by Millennium Pictures, Scottish Television, City of Glasgow, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, ASCAP, American Music Centre, Meet The Composer and the Astor Foundation. He was the Music Director for 'Illustrations of a Tormented Mind', Prague's celebration of the 150th anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe. The festival presented films, drama, exhibitions, orchestral music and opera where his Poe Opera Trilogy was performed to sold-out audiences at the Prague Castle. Articles on his music have appeared in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, numerous magazines and periodicals with TV and radio appearances on the BBC, WQXR, WNYC, and Deutsche Welle. He trained at the Eastman School of Music under Christopher Rouse and Joseph Schwantner, where he received the Max Dreyfus Award for Music Theatre.
He scored Rob Green's _Bunker, THe (2001)_, a thriller/horror feature film starring Jason Flemyng and Jack Davenport. Produced in London's Twickenham Film Studios, The Bunker was screened at Cannes with theatrical releases throughout Europe, Scandinavia and Japan. The composer orchestrated and produced the 35 minute full orchestral and choral score which was digitally recorded in 5.1 surround sound with The Prague Symphony Orchestra and Kuhn Mixed Chorus in the Dvorak Hall in Prague's world renowned Rudolfinum. He also scored Green's The Black Cat for orchestra and chorus based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story, which was released in the UK with The Dark Half and is often seen on Channel 4 (UK). Sight and Sound praised the soundtrack as "a superb music score and a wonderful symphony of clanks and creaks, that functions as a talking book of the story." Other film scores include: Dizzy Horse, a finalist at the Student Academy Awards and AZUL, a film about the poets of Nicaragua that premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.- IMDb Mini Biography By: russell.currie2@verizon.net - Russell Currie is a versatile composer having composed music for film, opera/music theatre, orchestra, chamber music and dance. He is "a composer who puts an idiosyncratically musical syntax at the service of a coolly romantic esthetic" (The New York Times). His music is "rich in dramatic orchestral color with direct emotional lyrical lines that discover an effective balance between dissonance and clarifying tonality" (The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians) and "knows how to sustain, modulate and build a mood that is all of a piece" (Opera News). His works have been sponsored and commissioned by Millennium Pictures, Scottish Television, Glasgow City Council, New York State Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, ASCAP, American Music Center, Meet The Composer, Astor Foundation and The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Prague. Articles on his music have appeared in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, numerous international magazines and periodicals with TV and radio appearances on the BBC, WQXR, WNYC, and Deutsche Welle. He trained at the Eastman School of Music with Christopher Rouse and Joseph Schwantner, where he 3-time winner of the ASCAP Max Dreyfus Award for Music Theatre. His film music includes orchestral/choral scores for feature films to intimate scores for shorts and documentaries. He scored Rob Green's The Bunker, a thriller/horror feature starring Jason Flemyng (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Snatch, The Red Violin) and Jack Davenport (The Talented Mr. Ripley). The music is "a brooding old fashioned score which heralds the first of many portents to doom and age old scare tactics. But they work" (FrightFest 2001). The score was recorded in The Rudolfinum with The Prague Symphony Orchestra and Kuhn Mixed Chorus and produced in Twickenham Film Studios. He also scored Green's The Black Cat which "a superb music score, a wonderful symphony of clanks and creaks, that functions as a talking book of the story" (Sight and Sound). Based on Edgar Allan Poe's short story, The Black Cat was released with Stephen King's The Dark Half and is often seen on Ch 4-UK. The Bunker was released throughout Europe, Scandinavia and Japan and now available on DVD which also includes The Black Cat. Other scores include: Dizzy Horse, a film for children (Finalist at the Student Academy Awards); AZUL, a documentary about Nicaraguan poets (The Berlin Film Festival) and two presentations about NYC parks: The Heart of the City - a visual history of Central Park (with Robert Preston and Julie Harris) and Perfect Roses - the history of the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. His latest opera Mackintosh (the life and times of Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh) was commissioned by Scottish Television, The Glasgow City Council and the Glasgow Development Agency. Hailed "as a laudable idea!" (The Glasgow Herald) Mackintosh excerpts have been performed during BBC Music Live 1999, ScotFest 1999, UKwithNY 2001 and at The Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. His first monodrama Caliban (1992) is based on the character from The Tempest and premiered at Greenwich House Music-NYC. Making "a remarkable transition from dissonant to tonal sound which makes a great deal of sense in its macro-dimension (and has many marvelous details in the others, too) which is not always the case these days" (Manchester Evening News), Caliban premiered in Britain in 1994 with The Goldberg Ensemble and choreographer Jeremy James. In 1999,Caliban had an unprecedented three-week Off-Broadway staging by the Vital Theatre and was the "Pick of the Week" (Time Out). His satirical opera, Rimshot--The Banishment and Rise to Fame of Joe Rimshot, Rock Drummer, casts opera singers as heavy metal rockers. "An opera that takes chances" (Village Voice) it "deals with the fall and return of a rock drummer. RIMSHOT, like Twyla Tharp's EVERLAST, deals in the icons of pop culture, balancing the evanescence of success against a contrived 'happy end' as tart as that of The Threepenny Opera" (Opera News). His Edgar Allan Poe Opera Trilogy is "an allegory of man's tormented inner life...that the conclusion was a spine-tingler reflects credit on the composer" (Opera News). As Music Director for Illustrations of a Tormented Mind, (Prague's festival for the 150th anniversary Edgar Allan Poe's death), he performed his Poe Trilogy to sold-out audiences at the Prague Castle. Other performances include: Bronx Arts Ensemble (Merkin Concert Hall, Lehman Center for the Performing Arts, Wave Hill, Bronx Community College Arts), ORRA (Symphony Space, Greenwich Music House), Golden Fleece Opera Company (TOMI) and Opera Rochester. Also during that festival, The Prague Symphony premiered his recent orchestral work Dreams (1999) in the Rudolfinum. Select other works include: Frozen Motion commissioned by the Mistral and Chicago Saxophone Quartets and Wet On Wet commissioned by Tom Stacy, the principal English horn for the New York Philharmonic.- IMDb Mini Biography By: russellcurrie@mac.com
- SpouseJulie Currie(October 2, 2001 - present)
- Maintains one of the finest collections of books by and about Edgar Allan Poe.
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