Mistral Goes to Hollywood

Concert
Mistral Music
Congregation Kehillath Israel
Brookline, MA
February 8, 2026

With Sarita Kwok (violin), Lucia Lin (violin), Stephanie Fong (viola), Owen Young (cello), Julie Scolnik (flute), Todd Palmer (clarinet), Sarah Bob (piano)

Mistral artistic director and flutist Julie Scolnik has put together a wonderfully entertaining and charming selection of film pieces for this midwinter concert, truly warming and engaging in the midst of the snow and freezing temperatures. She has rallied a superb roster of chamber musicians to the task, and filled the spacious concert space at Temple Kehillath Israel in Brookline with familiar tunes, rich and resonant tones, and some fabulous instrumental pyrotechnics.

First off was John Kusiak’s Film Noir, a dark and haunting piece that proceeds with a consistently shadowy quality and a recurrent theme that beckons from the various corners of its trio, sometimes with lively embellishments of arpeggios and triplets to season the shadows. It’s a twilit piece, but not a somber one, and winks at every turn, with a sense of fun hidden around each corner. Thematically accessible but interesting, it offers some stimulating fast footwork for the players, adding, at times, an invitingly percolating scramble to the overall lurking tone. Kusiak, a Boston area native and composer of many film and television scores, including several for films by noted Boston-area documentarian Errol Morris, was present for the performance. (Kusiak, by the way, is a good friend of mine.)

With a slight change of personnel from cello to violin, the Nino Rota pieces rolled out with Rota’s typically wonderful playfulness in the Allegrissimo from his Trio for clarient, cello and piano, a speedy retort to Kusiak’s more dominantly sneaking pace, but both paces entirely welcome. Following this was the wonderful and lovely theme from the great Federico Fellini film Amarcord (1973), done with breadth and lovely romanticism, making one want to pull up the great film and watch it again. Rota, wonderfully playful as well as lyrical, is well-known, among other noted, accomplishments, as Fellini’s justifiably favorite film composer and for his iconic scores for Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972-1990) films.

John Williams, whose ninety-fourth birthday fell on the day of this concert, is well-known, of course, for most of the music of films by Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and indeed plenty of others, creating sonic icons that have populated our world for the last fifty years. Prominently evocative among these is his work for Spielberg’s Holocaust film Schindler’s List with that violin theme so vividly realized for the film by Itzhak Perlman. Here, two pieces, from that film, Jewish Town and the eponymous Schindler’s List (1993) joined the also evocative Princess Leia’s Theme from George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977) in a sweet arrangement for quartet by Patrick O’Malley. Of course, we are used to hearing these themes with robust orchestral verve and listened with more delicate ears to the poignantly evocative summations of that robustness offered here. Sarita Kwok’s featured violin solos were notably rich in tone and beautifully phrased, adding wonderful depth to these chamber adaptations.

Serge Prokoviev’s Overture on Jewish Themes finished the first half with wonderful interpolations by Prokoviev of some evocative Hebraic melodies. Of course, Prokoviev, a native Russian, had his own particular take on Jewish themes, sometimes with a mixture of the modally affecting Jewish tonalities with more modernist flavors, but still very welcome.

After the intermission arrived the most explosively dramatic part of the concert, a stunningly virtuosic performance by Lucia Lin of John Corigliano’s The Red Violin Caprices for solo violin, composed for the 1998 film directed by François Girard. Apparently Lin prepared this piece for this concert at the request of artistic director Scolnik and it’s amazing to think that Lin pulled this amazingly challenging work out of a hat in a relatively short time. To watch Lin execute the frighteningly challenging arrays of double-stopped scales brings shivers of admiration. It was truly a command performance and Lin executed it impeccably. The audience, quite spontaneously, rose enthusiastically to its feet to give her credit for her outstanding efforts and accomplishments.

Rounding out the concert was Bernard Herrmann’s stirring and creepy Psycho Suite. We learned that, in fact, Alfred Hitchcock had specifically asked Herrmann not to write music for the famous shower scene for his 1960 masterpiece Psycho, but Herrmann had disobeyed. When the time came, Hitchcock actually said something like I wish I had asked for some music here and Herrmann pulled his piece out of the drawer, to Hitchcock’s surprise and delight. Since that time, well over sixty years ago, the frightfulness of that moment has glorified screens everywhere.

At the very end, Ennio Morricone’s lovely music for Cinema Paradiso (1988) provided a lyrical and warming flourish, with its main theme that almost sounds like I’ve Never Been In Love Before from the musical Guys and Dolls (1950) but takes off into its own lyrical space afterwards. It repeats appealingly and echoes, from earlier in the program, the charms of Nino Rota’s music from Amarcord, giving a rich pair of Italian cinematic slices to this delightfully nourishing program.

Suffice it to say that the playing was top notch, with, as noted above, pyrotechnic pizzazz by violinist Lucia Lin, wonderfully resonant and evocative lyricism by violinist Sarita Kwok, precise and energetic pianistic bravado by Sarah Bob, lovely and tuneful fluting by Julie Scolnik, adept and eloquent articulation by clarinetist Todd Palmer, and rich and evocative support on cello by Owen Young and on viola by Stephanie Fong.

Overall: Truly a delightful concert, with evocative and technically masterful playing, and wonderfully interesting and accessible film pieces by a great array of contemporary, and some still living, composers.

– BADMan (aka Charles Munitz)