‘Phantom of the Opera’ scores assist from VSO musicians, special guest

Old-timers used to talk about a ghost haunting the Kiggins Theatre. No ghost has been sighted recently, as far as we know, but on Sunday you can experience a terrifying theatrical haunting there while live musicians scare up an appropriately creepy score.

“The Phantom of the Opera” is a melodramatic tale about the power of live music, so Sunday’s screening of the silent 1925 film version at the grand old Kiggins, accompanied by musicians from the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and visiting pianist and arranger Rodney Sauer, may be the ultimate marriage of story, setting and sound.

The VSO’s silent-movie chamber-group concerts have mostly been comedies, featuring films by early screen clowns like Buster Keaton, Fatty Arbuckle and Charlie Chaplain. But this time, it’s early screen monster Lon Chaney, famous for disturbing movie roles like the Hunchback of Notre Dame and this opera-house phantom. (You may be more familiar with his son, Lon Chaney Jr., who took Dad’s idea and ran with it — appearing as all four of Universal Pictures’ greatest horrors: Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Mummy and Frankenstein’s monster.)

In “The Phantom of the Opera,” the stars and management of the Paris Opera House are sent into a tizzy when a meddlesome ghost starts making his own diva-casting decisions — and enforcing those decisions in lethal ways. He’s really only a fugitive motivated by love, but somehow his love means spooky shadows, magical curses and a winding staircase that plunges into the catacombs below the theater. What’s down there? The stuff of nightmares — like the masked Phantom himself, jamming away on the grandest pipe organ you’ve ever heard.

There’s no pipe organ at the Kiggins, but since this isn’t 1925, it’s not a problem. “We’ll be using a digital piano, and that gives me some powerful pipe-organ sounds for the Phantom’s underground music,” said Sauer. That music will mostly be improvised by Sauer, based on themes elsewhere in his score.

Pianist and composer Sauer has carved out a unique niche for himself as one of the world’s premier silent-film score arrangers, usually drawing upon prefabricated “scene scores” from a century ago to weave together whole movie soundtracks. “Composers and music publishers published music for different kinds of scenes,” he said. “You could buy music for a storm scene, a love scene, a chase scene. It was intended to be a library. You watch a movie, you pick music for each scene out of the library and put together your own score.”

But because the 1925 “Phantom” includes a famous ballet sequence from “Faust,” Sauer said he was able to employ the actual music from that 1859 ballet, by Charles Gounod. Opera fans will hear other familiar excerpts, too, he said, “especially a gorgeous aria from ‘The Pearl Fishers’ during the underground voyage to the Phantom’s lair.”

The Boulder, Colo.-based Sauer usually works with his own Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra, but he’s an old pal of Vancouver Symphony Orchestra manager and clarinetist Igor Shakhman, who invited him a few years ago to start visiting Vancouver annually, rehearsing with a chamber group from the VSO and accompanying silent film screenings at the Kiggins. On Sunday, you’ll hear Stephen Shepherd on violin, Dieter Ratzlaf on cello and Bruce Dunn on trumpet along with Shakhman on clarinet and Sauer on digital piano.

Sauer, who has watched this movie countless times while scoring and accompanying it, offered his own appreciation of its colorful looks and expressive star. “Silent films were often ‘tinted’ so that different scenes had blue or amber tones, but this film goes rather riotously into reds and greens, as well,” he said. “And the beginning of the second half, the opera ball, was filmed in an early Technicolor process so we can see the colors of all of the ball costumes.

“Lon Chaney’s parents both were deaf, so he was raised knowing how to communicate nonverbally. For most of the movie he’s acting in a mask, but he is able to convey an amazing amount of emotion just from very subtle uses of his hands. The movie can be a mess in places, but the Gothic sets, the overall dark mood, and especially watching Chaney work past his restrictive costumes and makeup are the joys of seeing this film on the big screen.”