Pops Series Keybank POPS I

THE ORIGINAL PHATOM OF THE OPERA

Saturday, October 15, 8pm, Morris

A native of Clifton, New Jersey, Rick Friend studied piano and composition at the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music.

An avid movie buff since childhood, Rick became interested in silent movies in his high school days, when, just for fun, he and his  friends rented from the library a 20 minute version of Buster Keaton's The General. Watching it in silence for a few minutes irked his curiosity to go over to the piano and start improvising for the film as it played. From then on, he was hooked on silent movie improv music. Serious improvisations began 20 years later at the Loyola Movie Palace in Los Angeles, California, where he accompanied international  silent movies such as Faust, and Madame Dubarry.  In Canada, he played for 4 seasons of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Open Vault Series, and for 10 seasons at the Toronto Film Society. He became involved in Cinemateque Ontario, accompanying their showings of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and Carl Dreyer's  The Passion of Joan of Arc.  Later, he mounted his own showing of The Passion of Joan of Arc with his own score for 9 musicians, at The Music Gallery in Toronto.

Rick has performed his arrangements for The Mark of Zorro, The General, The Thief of Bagdad, The Phantom of the Opera, and Nosferatu with The Fort Worth Symphony, The Atlanta Symphony, the Orchestre Symphonique de Quebec, the Ocean City Pops in New Jersey, the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, Massachusetts, the Regina Symphony in Canada, the Elgin Symphony in Elgin, Ill and the Traverse Symphony at Interlochen, MI.

Also, he played at the annual Savannah Music Festival 3 times, accompanying  Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr.,  Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail, and Charlie Chaplin's The Kid as part of their American Heritage series.

Rick has developed a never ending passion for live music for silent movies. His favorite venue is the symphony orchestra, which, with it’s infinite variety of colours, serves well the values, moods, and feelings in these works of art from the Golden Age of silent movies.

In 1997, Rick helped Toronto honor their own Mary Pickford (1891 — 1979) in a TV biography special, “The Life and Times of Mary Pickford” which airs periodically on CBC. In the same year, he finished scoring a dramatic short film, The Red Window. His piece "Wilcox Street" for brass quintet was performed in Los Angeles in 2000.

Rick continues to play for local showings in Los Angeles.

His mission is to bring back the art-form of live music with silent movies.