“What have you done during the pandemic?” is a question we will all ask each other for years to come. “I starred in a movie,” is something only very few of us will be able to say, but this is what the musicians of the Siam Sinfonietta, an award-winning youth orchestra based in Bangkok, got up to when Thailand went into lockdown. I talk to the orchestra’s founder, Thai-American composer and conductor Somtow Sucharitkul, and Thailand-based British film director Paul Spurrier about this unique and joyful project that saw them creating The Maestro: A Symphony of Terror, a film that will be released this summer at festivals around the world.
As pandemic-prevention rules forbade group meetings, the Siam Sinfonietta, founded in 2010 and already claiming performances in Carnegie Hall, Berlin and Prague, saw all their plans for 2020 being pushed back – including important projects such as Mahler's Third Symphony and the Thai premiere of Beethoven's Missa solemnis. Sucharitkul grew concerned about the mental wellbeing of the young artists in his care, spanning ages from 16 to 24. Of worry were not only the obstacles to their musical development, but also the lack of real time interaction with people, which is an essential part of growing up as a young musician.
But there was a loophole: to help the local cinema industry – which in 2019 saw record numbers of international filming in Thailand – rehearsals, performances and recording were still permitted, with some restrictions, if part of a television or film production. “I was part of the team that wrote the rules for filming,” Spurrier tells me. “That was when I realised that it was possible to film, provided you're very careful. This missing year is such a crucial point in the development of young musicians, so we realised that there could be some symbiosis there.”
The plot of the film pays homage to B horror movies. It revolves around a composer and conductor, played by Sucharitkul himself, plagued by rejection and memories of a traumatic childhood, who gathers a group of troubled young musicians in his lavish yet abandoned family mansion to help him premiere a new symphony he's writing. But what starts as a moment of freedom and celebration of artistic independence soon devolves into chaos and orchestrally-themed murder. Is this the price to pay for genius?
When I hazard to say that to me it almost felt like watching an opera, Sucharitkul partially agrees: “It's very sort of German Romantic, in some ways. This film is about this passion that can only really be lived by going mad and dying horribly. Whenever I teach music to my orchestra, I tell them that there's only a few German words they absolutely have to know. And one of them is Sehnsucht, which is the kind of longing that is so desperate that you almost have to die to achieve it. And that somehow wormed its way into the story, because even though the conductor kills people, and is a horrible person, on some level he's quite sympathetic.”
But why horror? Sucharitkul is also a science fiction, fantasy and horror author, writing under the pen name S. P. Somtow, and both he and Spurrier have an enduring love of the genre. “We have such a large shared vocabulary of cinematic experiences, going all the way back to our separate childhoods. The homage to the B horror movie was the first thing that came to the surface in both of our minds.”
“This project was born as a way of involving, exciting and entertaining the musicians,” adds Spurrier. “The reason people join the Siam Sinfonietta is to be inspired but also to have fun. If we were making something very stodgy, some very deep art film, that maybe wasn't the best way to engage young people. We're living through strange times in Covid, so while making a film which fell roughly into the genre of horror, we also wanted it to have humour.
“We went back to the films of the 80s that had a tremendous sense of energetic fun, from Roger Corman and Joe Dante, through to films like Poltergeist and Tobe Hooper's, where you came out feeling you might have had a roller coaster ride and some chills but you didn't come out disturbed for life, you know?”
Even amidst the restrictions and challenges brought about by the situation, the experience for everyone involved was a positive one. “It was great to hear this amazing music come out of these musicians who hadn't, at that point, played together for over nine months, and to experience their relief and joy,” Spurrier recalls.
Having Sucharitkul as an endless source of encyclopaedic classical music knowledge meant also that they were able to include in-jokes and references that only musicians might notice.
“The first things you hear are familiar pieces of music, like The Magic Flute, or the Entry of the Gods into Valhalla, which, of course, happens while the conductor is on the toilet,” Sucharitkul laughs, mentioning only a few examples “or the little boy who hates Chopin, after his father says at the end "don't worry, I'll never force you to play Chopin again", then you hear him practising the slow movement of Chopin's Piano Concerto.” And bars from Chopin's concerto also feature in the composer's new symphony, almost as if he transmuted the kid's hatred into his own score.
A composer writing a symphony imagining what an insane person's score would sound like was also an unusual approach that opened up the musical process to new fascinating depths.