2015-05-08

We are proud to announce that the winner of the 1st annual Wojciech Kilar Award is Elliot Goldenthal. He is one of the most versatile composers of contemporary music; winner of the Oscar, Golden Globe and World Soundtrack Award. His oeuvre includes music composed for film, opera, ballet, symphony orchestras and theater, as well as chamber music.

On April 30, 2015 the Wojciech Kilar Award’s Expert Council, consisting of directors of the most important Polish cultural institutions, selected the winner of the first edition of the award established in 2014 by the Presidents of Krakow and Katowice. Its aim is primarily to honor and celebrate the memory of Wojciech Kilar, as well as emphasize the importance of the ethos of the composer in the interdisciplinary world of film. With the Award’s establishment, name and accomplishments of Wojciech Kilar, one of the most recognizable Polish composers of the 20th and 21st centuries, will gain a new international dimension.

The Award consists of a common fund for a recording session with the participation of any orchestra from Silesia and Krakow. This is the second important award granted at the Krakow Film Music Festival. Since 2013, the festival grants a special statuette to a FMF Young Talent Award winner, a young composer that has succeeded in winning the international competition in which the task is to compose music for film clips, animation or video games.

The Kilar Award is granted for the lifetime achievement to composers of film music who remain faithful to the traditional art of composing, write scores that in isolation from the image do not lose clarity, and efficiently use the language of music, producing rich and distinct colors, shades and textures in their work.

The criteria for the Wojciech Kilar Award turn away from the quest for industrialization and the primacy of special effects in film music soundtracks. Founding this Award is to a way to take part in the debate by juxtaposing the traditional art of composing film music with its assembly line, business-like alternative. The vast majority of composers producing music as if in a factory do not have direct contact with autonomous work. Often standing at the forefront, the composer is just the author of several themes that are harmonized, instrumented and prepared by a staff of anonymous musicians, says Robert Piaskowski, Artistic Director of the Krakow FMF, the originator of the Award. Our duty is to emphasize the importance and worth of film music often called the "new classic". 

Editor-in-Chief of Polish Music Publishing Daniel Cichy said that, In his work, Elliot Goldenthal combines respect for tradition, humility in relation to the composer’s craft, and remarkable ability to connect with orchestras and to fully feel and understand the medium of film. Juggling styles and conventions with ease, frequently on the verge between aesthetic worlds, Goldenthal masterfully complements the film director’s vision, sometimes following in-line with it and almost illustrating the protagonists' emotions, and other times standing in opposition to the film’s expression, creating a contrapuntal narrative painting with sound. Interestingly, however, despite being met with a diversity of styles and a variety of orchestrations as well as the need to intelligently embody of the film’s theme, genre and form, the composer always creates a coherent musical message. And this is a trait that distinguishes the most prominent and outstanding from the rest. 

Elliot Goldenthal is perhaps best known for his film music scores to Titus (1999), Frida (2002), Across The Universe (2007), The Tempest (2010) and most recently A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2015) all directed by Julie Taymor, as well as films by Neil Jordan Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Michael Collins (1996), for which he received Oscar nominations. Among his other works, we may also list: Alien 3 (1992), Batman Forever (1995), Heat (1995), A Time to Kill (1996), The Butcher Boy (1997), Batman & Robin (1997), Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) and Public Enemies (2009).