Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra
The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra is a five-piece chamber ensemble, based in Colorado, that revives the repertoire of silent film orchestras.
“The results are often breathtakingly beautiful and always in the strict service of the film on the screen.” —Dave Kehr, The New York Times.
Using historic libraries of music, and selecting and fitting a piece of “photoplay music” for each scene in the film, Mont Alto compiles vibrant and emotional scores using the original techniques of silent film orchestras.
Since 1994, Mont Alto has scored over 150 silent films, recording over 40 film scores for releases on DVD, Blu-Ray, and for showings on Turner Classic Movies. The Mont Alto Orchestra appears regularly at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival, the TCM Classic Film Festival, the Denver Silent Film Festival, the Chautauqua Auditorium film series, and the Kansas Silent Film Festival.
The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra features Rodney Saure on piano, Britt Swenson on violin, Brian Collins on clarinet, Dawn Kramer on trumpet, and Yoriko Morita on cello.
Mont Alto has toured the country from the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York to Grauman’s Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.
Mont Alto records scores for home video releases of silent films in collaboration with Flicker Alley, Film Preservation Associates, Lobster Films, Kino-Lorber, the Criterion Collection, the Cohen Collection, Timeline Films, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and Milestone Video. These have been very well received, and are considered some of the finest modern recorded silent film scores.
Mont Alto also releases albums. Our most recent release is “Entreaty,” a CD of silent film compositions for romantic scenes. Entreaty was chosen as Album of the Week by KDFC Classical FM on June 11 2018.
Mont Alto collects original compositions and orchestrations from the turn of the century through 1930 for its tea dance series, silent film presentations, and concerts. Rodney Sauer also presents concert-lectures and workshops on photoplay music history and practice. He is working to get young musicians aware of this repertoire of music, and interested in compiling their own silent film scores.
Recent projects include their score for the classic 1926 adventure film Beau Geste, Clara Bow’s flapper comedy It, and a series of Paramount features for Artcraft Pictures including The New Klondike, The Affairs of Anatol, and The Caveman.