Chester Music has signed a new long-term publishing agreement with Gabriel Yared and has also acquired the back catalogue of scores in his Yad Music and Deva Music companies. Included in this agreement are scores to films such as A Royal Affair, Autumn in New York, Betty Blue, Breaking and Entering, Camille Claudel, Coco Chanel et Igor Stravinsky, Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) and L’avion, plus the ballet scores for The Raven Girl, Clavigo and Shamrock.
Yared scored four films with the much-missed director Anthony Minghella; he won an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy for his score to The English Patient. In addition he has received two ASCAP awards and has twice been awarded the Anthony Asquith Award for Film Music from BAFTA. At the present time he is working with the Canadian director Xavier Dolan (Tom at the Farm, It’s Only the End of the World and the upcoming The Death and Life of John F Donovan). Another recent score is The Happy Prince, directed and starring Rupert Everett which was released in January this year.
Gabriel Yared comments: 'I am very excited to be working with Chester Music once again. I look forward to continuing our strong collaboration.'
James Rushton, Managing Director of Chester Music comments:
'Gabriel Yared is a composer and artist of the greatest subtlety and cultural sensitivity. His ear for writing music that meets exactly the needs of his collaborators on film or stage projects, and his ability to write with an innate understanding of the forces at hand are of a very rare quality indeed. We are extremely pleased to extend our relationship with Gabriel and to be the publisher of music of such excellence.'
About Gabriel Yared...
Gabriel Yared was born in 1949 and lived in Lebanon for the first eighteen years of his life. He attended a Jesuit boarding school in Beirut where he spent most of his time between the age of 4 and 14. Alongside his studies he learned music on his own, practising on the school organ and reading the repertoire thanks to the musical library of the Jesuits. He was first and foremost fascinated by what he heard and was soon determined to learn the techniques of musical composition, and pursued this by reading the classical repertoire. Although he benefited from a classical education with the great masters, including Dutilleux and Maurice Ohanna, he remains at heart a fervent self-taught musician, open to all kinds of music. For example, in his teenage years he transcribed all The Beatles' albums, Marvin Gaye and Thelonious Monk.
At the end of the 1960s he worked every night in the jazz clubs of Rio de Janeiro for 18 months, and met several Brazilian musicians who had a profound impact upon his music – Ivan Lins, Jorge Bem, Milton Nascimento, Egberto Gismonti, and many others. During the 1970s Yared collaborated as a song writer and orchestrator with, among others, Johnny Hallyday, Charles Aznavour, Mina and the Costa Brothers. He has also written music for dance and says: 'I have a love of composing for dance choreography. More so than for cinema, this medium satisfies my needs to compose for the illusion, the imagination. While cinema communicates its message essentially though image and dialogue, ballet on the other hand draws its inspiration from music. Choreography is born from it, music is often the source of dance and movement.'
Since 1980 Yared has devoted most of his time to composing original scores for film, and has worked on over seventy movies to date, including Betty Blue, The Talented Mr Ripley, Sylvia, Cold Mountain and The English Patient directed by Anthony Minghella which received an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, and a Grammy.
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Kate Johnson, Promotion and Communications Director
Photo credit: Laurent Koffel
