Charlie Chaplin Credit The Gold Rush © Roy Export S.A.S
Date: 3 January 2011, 7pm | Location: Southbank Centre, London
The Philharmonia Orchestra plays a live accompaniment to Charlie Chaplin’s silent film The Gold Rush in this special performance at Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall.
Featuring Chaplin in his quintessential Little Tramp role, the film was described by The New York Times upon its 1925 release as ‘a comedy with streaks of poetry, pathos, tenderness, linked with brusqueness and boisterousness… the outstanding gem of all Chaplin’s pictures’.
Chaplin reconstructed the film in 1942 upon the advent of sound to the cinema, removing scenes (most famously eliminating a kiss with the leading lady at the end so as not to upset his wife!) and recording a musical score, which was nominated for Academy Awards.
This evening’s concert revisits the original 1925 comic masterpiece, with a score reconstructed and conducted by Carl Davis, who accessed archives of Chaplin’s meticulous notes and found sketches of music for the removed scenes.
Visit the Southbank Centre for tickets.
