Without a mask and a secret, how super can a hero really be? Maybe only about as much as a movie without music.
Secret identities for champions of the people came into fashion with “The Scarlet Pimpernel,” a play, novel and movie from the early 20th century about one unlikely protector of the aristocracy during the French Revolution. Useless dandy by day becomes masked vigilante by night, rescuing deserving rich folks from the guillotine.
Better known today is Senor Zorro, the daring swordsman whose real identity is swathed in black — mask, hat and cape — and whose self-appointed mission, in the early 1800s, is protecting the poor and powerless from corruption and cruelty in Spanish California. His signature is that mark — a zigzagging Z sliced into the faces of bad guys he defeats.
Rodney Sauer is a kind of superhero, too, but his secret is out. The composer and pianist has built a unique career as one of the world’s premier silent-film musicians and score arrangers. And, he’s an old friend of Igor Shakhman, executive director and principal clarinetist for the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, which is why he travels here annually to play with VSO musicians while the Kiggins Theatre screens a silent-film classic.
If You Go
• What: “The Mark of Zorro” with live musical accompaniment by Rodney Sauer, pianist and conductor, with a small group from the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.
• When: 3 p.m. Jan. 21.
• Where: Kiggins Theatre, 1101 Main St., Vancouver.
• Cost: $25; $10 for students.
• Information: vancouversymphony.org
On Sunday afternoon that will be “The Mark of Zorro,” the first (1920) film version of the story, which cemented the stardom of early action hero Douglas Fairbanks and is credited with sparking the whole swashbuckling adventure genre.
Modular music
Like many adventure heroes, Sauer never saw what his future held. He was not a silent-film buff, just a music student at the University of Colorado at Boulder, when he stumbled upon a collection of undiscovered silent-film scores in the library there.
He was amazed to learn how this modular music used to work, he said: pulled off the shelf and plugged in, scene by scene.
“None of this music was written for a particular film,” he said. “Composers and music publishers published music for different kinds of scenes. You could buy music for a storm scene, a love scene, a chase scene. It was intended to be a library.”
That’s why Sauer usually calls himself not a composer or arranger but a “compiler” of authentic film scores — fitting together vintage parts to come up with a soundtrack that really could have been heard a century ago. There are thousands of individual pieces of music to choose from, Sauer said. His Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra has scored more than 80 silent films and recorded soundtracks for more than 30 silent-film DVD releases, and is a frequent guest at film festivals and other special events.
Joining Sauer for this Sunday’s screening of “The Mark of Zorro” will be a small group of players from the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra: Eva Richey, violin; Dieter Ratzlaf, cello; Bruce Dunn, trumpet; and Igor Shakhman, clarinet.
