The First Beijing International Film Festival (BIFF) will bring 100 foreign and 60 Chinese films to the capital, from April 23 to 28. To celebrate the inaugural event, Cinematology Symphonic Visual Concerts will be held at the Great Hall of People on the opening and closing days.

Oscar winner-composer Nicola Piovani will lead the 40-year-old Italian Orchestra of Cinema, the first symphonic Italian organization specialized in the interpretation and performance of the repertory of film music, to play melodies from foreign film classics such as Gone With the Wind, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Life is Beautiful.

Soundtracks from Chinese films will include heavyweights such as Road Home and The Shaolin Temple.

Chinese singers Liu Huan, Tan Jing and Chang Shilei will team up with the orchestra to present well-known classical film soundtracks.

Piano, trumpet, violin and vocal music, both English and Chinese, will be combined with LEDs and other multimedia tools, to enhance the concerts' visual appeal.

Piovani won the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score in 1998 for Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful.

The composer, whose visit marks his first to Beijing, says he will take his audience on a journey into the history of cinema, with his soundtracks for Federico Fellini (The Voice of the Moon) and Roberto Benigni (the multi-award winning Life is Beautiful).

He sees film music as a blessing saying, "a film composer has the chance to work outside the area of 'consumer' music and dead contemporary music that assaults the ear in the concert hall.

"Film music must follow as closely as possible the story that unfolds, in order to capture the characters' emotions and the narrative rhythm. It must track the people and the situations which are so often determined by the leading characters' actions," he says.

"A good score can help a film, but a bad score will hurt it irreparably, regardless of whether the film is good or bad," he adds.

Born in 1946 in Rome, Piovani has written more than 130 movie soundtracks and collaborated with such big names as John Irvin, Roberto Benigni and Bigas Luna.

He began his career by scoring documentaries, making a conscious decision to switch to features.

When working for cinema, he thinks more like a cinematographer than a musician, "since through your music you can enhance the emotions expressed in the film", he says.

"Despite all the technology that surrounds us, music will be always played, as it was 2,000 years ago, and will continue for the next 2,000 years," he says.

The concert will also see Chinese singer-songwriter Liu Huan, who performed the official song You and Me with British singer Sarah Brightman for the 2008 Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony, singing the theme song of BIFF, You, written by Zhang Heping and Zhao Jiping.

China Daily