The Sydney Opera House today announced that it will present the Sydney premiere of the Film Music of Nick Cave & Warren Ellis. Accompanied by Opera House resident companies the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, legendary Australian musicians Cave and Ellis will perform a selection of their stunning film soundtracks with full orchestra and a striking visual backdrop across three shows in the Concert Hall this December.
Film Music: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis
performing live with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra & Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
Sunday 8 December, 6:15pm
Monday 9 December, 6:15pm
Monday 9 December, 9:30pm
For the past 15 years, the duo has composed scores for both indie films and Hollywood features that are instantly recognisable for their minimal and hauntingly beautiful tones. Full of light and shade, creeping dread and inconsolable yearning, the heavily instrumental sounds inject humanity into the ghostly frontier towns, parched desert landscapes, post-apocalyptic war zones and extra-terrestrial vistas of their renowned films.
Their first commissioned soundtrack, the brutal outback western The Proposition (2005), scripted by Cave himself, introduced their signature widescreen compositions. In 2007, big studio work beckoned in the shape of the eerie score that underwrote the Oscar-nominated, sombre anti-western film, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Cave and Ellis reunited with The Proposition director John Hillcoat for the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s highly successful novel The Road (2009), creating an artfully minimal score combined with mournful piano and clanging industrial percussion that enhanced the lurking malice. In 2012, the duo composed a moving score for the documentary West of Memphis about a controversial murder case in Arkansas, followed by a melancholy score for David McKenzie’s masterful heist thriller Hell or High Water (2016). Wind River (2017) was a chilling murder set on a Native American reservation in Wyoming, with Cave and Ellis’ haunting arrangements delivering drama to the film’s wintry landscapes.
Nick Cave says: “Very often a tension can happen between music and picture that is about chance and a kind of unknowingness that can be really amazing. Just by putting together two things that were created in isolation, music and film, suddenly something quite magical can happen.”
One of the most critically-acclaimed artists in Australian contemporary music, ARIA Hall-of-Famer Nick Cave made his Sydney Opera House debut in 2013 with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ three sold-out performances in the Concert Hall following their first number one album, Push the Sky Away. In 2018, Cave returned to the Concert Hall for two sold-out, in-the-round performances of solo piano renditions and a poignant audience Q&A.
Warren Ellis’ Australian instrumentalist outfit Dirty Three made their Opera House debut in 2012 before returning to the Concert Hall this year at Vivid LIVE with a world-first performance of their classic 1994 self-titled debut album in celebration of its 25th anniversary.