Composer Jeff Beal has released his new album Body in Motion on the Platoon label. The recording features two of Beal's new concertos, Four Score and the titular Body in Motion, performed by violinist Kelly Hall-Tompkins, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and conductor Leonard Slatkin.
Premiered in 2024 and composed for Hall-Tompkins, Body in Motion blends the traditions of virtuoso violin playing and jazz in a constant, fluid motion that, according to Beal, treats the orchestra and soloist as "active natural forces."
Four Score is a concerto for orchestra that Beal composed as an 80th birthday gift for Slatkin. The piece celebrates Slatkin's parents, Eleanor Aller and Felix Slatkin, both of whom were founding members of the Hollywood String Quartet and prominent members of the Warner Brothers and Fox studio orchestras.
In homage to the family's roots in film music, a genre in which Beal himself has worked extensively, Beal imagined a concert piece "where I feel free, even perhaps emboldened to use some of the musical language I have employed in my thirty years writing for the screen."
Composer Jeff Beal is a five-time Emmy Award winner who has collaborated with film directors including Ed Harris, David Fincher, Oliver Stone, Lauren Greenfeld, Al Gore, and more. His concert music has been commissioned and performed by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Minnesota Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music, he founded The Beal Institute for Film Music and Contemporary Media at Eastman.
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