Ravinia 2026 Issue 2

women composers have occupied Karpman in- creasingly in recent years. In 2014, she co-found- ed the Alliance for Women FilmComposers—an organization providing visibility and advocacy for women composers—with Lolita Ritmanis and Miriam Cutler. Two years later, she became the first woman film composer elected to the music branch of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors. Laura Karpman has provided extensive program notes for this world premiere of Unsung : Unsung is a symphonic interrogation of cine- matic history. Film scores routinely celebrate the “main character”—historically male—while women are relegated to secondary motifs. For female characters, this most often means a love theme; while these can be lovely, they do not paint a full picture of who these women are. This collection of four themes seeks to rectify that imbalance by creating dramatically complex, commanding, and sweeping music for charac- ters who have been sidelined or restricted by the tropes of their era. By elevating these figures to “main character” status, the music celebrates the emotional, intellectual, and moral backbone of the women who drive these classic films. Varinia ( Spartacus , 1960) In this epic film, Varinia is often framedmerely as Spartacus’s romantic interest. Alex North, com- poser of the original score, wrote her a beautiful and soulful love theme. That music is adored— but it paints a limited picture. In truth, Varinia is the moral backbone of the rebellion. As a woman traded as property, her primary act of valor is her absolute refusal to be dehumanized. She is unbreakable, full of fury against her aggressors, remarkably brave, yet capable of profound love and empathy. This new theme captures her as a wily, cunning, and indomitable survivor who de- fies the Roman Empire with an unyielding spirit. This theme plays with the musical tropes of the era: action, romance, and a cinematic scoring interpretation of Ancient Rome. Laura Karpman The slave kitchen is hot and crowded. Crassus stands before Varinia, looking at her as one would inspect a horse for purchase. He reaches out to touch her face. Varinia recoils, her eyes burning with a dignity that no chain can break. She stands tall, speaking not just to the man, but to the Empire itself: “I am not a creature! I am a woman. … I was not born a slave. I was captured. My father was a free man. My mother was a free woman. You can take my body, but you cannot take my spirit.” Phyllis Dietrichson ( Double Indemnity , 1944) This music explores the “femme fatale” of the film noir genre not as a one-dimensional villain, but as a woman navigating a mid-century trap of zero mobility for ambitious women. Phyllis is villainized because she uses the few tools at her disposal—intellect, manipulation, seduction, and cold resolve—to forcibly shift her station in life. Here, her music is dissonant, surprising, and seductive, with an underpinning of pain. This theme is reminiscent of some of the mod- ernist scores of that time: jazzy and dissonant, mysterious and sinewy. The living room is dark, save for a single lamp. Phyllis stands motionless, her face a mask of cold ivory. She holds the gun, but it is lowered at her side. Walter walks toward her, slowly, pain- fully, clutching his wounded shoulder. He reach- es her and takes the gun from her limp hands. She puts her hands on his chest, almost as if in a trance, searching his eyes: “No. I never loved you, Walter. Not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the heart. I used you, just as you said. That’s all you ever meant to me … until a minute ago. When I couldn’t fire that second shot … I never thought that could happen to me.” Annie Johnson ( Imitation of Life , 1959) Annie Johnson is the still and formidable center of a spinning world. Always wearing a smile as a mask, she thinly conceals her heart’s ach- ing pain. On camera, she seems impervious and sunny in the face of her daughter’s cruelty—but she is modeling a refusal of shame, setting an example for those around her. Annie is the mor- al center of the story, selfless in her sacrifice, unwavering to the end. Her theme closes not in triumph but in gravity—the weight of a life lived entirely in service of love. She carries the blues inside her—the tonality, a rub between major and minor and almost Ives-like textures, transforms this into something equally valiant and jarring. A cramped, dimly lit bedroom. Annie sits on the edge of the bed, her back straight despite her exhaustion. She has just been rejected by her daughter, who is passing for white. She folds a piece of clothing with meticulous care, her face composed in a mask of grace, though a sin- gle tear escapes: “I’m not crying for myself. I’m crying for my baby. Someday she’ll know what she threw away. And she’ll come back. They al- ways come back.” Lady Marian ( The Adventures of Robin Hood , 1938) Erich Korngold literally invented the action he- ro’s theme in this 1938 score. Every composer who came after him—from John Williams to the composers of the Marvel Cinematic Uni- verse, including me—inherited his musical vocabulary directly. The sweeping brass and propulsive strings tell an audience: this person is the center of the universe; this person acts; this person wins. Yet for Lady Marian, he wrote a love theme. Unsung hears her as the woman who made the fight for justice possible. This finale takes the swashbuckler tradition—the brass, the propulsion, the unambiguous decla- ration of heroism—and assigns it, for the first time, to Lady Marian. Her theme is stylistically evocative of the era the film is set in: trumpets herald her arrival in the most majestic way, with a sweeping B theme and action music to repre- sent tension and travails. The Great Hall of Nottingham Castle. Mari- an stands before the high table, surrounded by armed guards and the powerful men who have sentenced her to death for treason. She does not look to the door for a rescuer; she looks Prince John directly in the eye, her voice ringing out through the stone chamber: “You’re willing to defy Sir Guy—even Prince John himself—to risk your own life. I know now why you tried so hard to kill this outlaw whom you despise. It’s because he was the one man in England who protected the helpless against a lot of beasts who were drunk on human blood. And now you intend to murder your own brother. Sorry? I’d do it again if you killed me for it.” –Program notes © 2026 Todd E. Sullivan MARINALSOP, Ravinia Chief Conductor For Marin Alsop’s biography, see page 97. 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