Chevalier (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Born as the illegitimate, mixed-race offspring of a French plantation owner in Guadeloupe and an enslaved Senegalese servant, Joseph Bologne might easily have spent his life in unheralded obscurity. Instead, he was taken to Paris aged seven, and quickly showed prodigious talent as a fencer, horseman, dancer, composer and musician. Poised at one point to head the Paris Opera, his appointment was blocked by a cabal of singers unwilling to submit to his orders. Incredible as Bologne’s story is, it has long been overshadowed by that of his contemporary Mozart, and by a historic tendency in classical music to marginalise the work of Black and women composers. It is, though, now being colourfully told in Chevalier, a feature film directed by Stephen Williams, with music by contemporary composer Kris Bowers and Bologne himself. Bologne was, among other things, a highly gifted violinist, and the movie’s soundtrack includes excerpts from his Violin Concerto, performed by the brilliant young American Randall Goosby. “We were incredibly excited about bringing Randall Goosby onto the project, and it turned out that he had just performed this piece fairly recently,” Bowers tells Apple Music Classical. Bowers, whose previous soundtrack credits include the TV series Bridgerton and movie Green Book, was unaware of Bologne’s work before joining the Chevalier project. “I studied Joseph’s music to learn some of his musical tendencies, and I then found ways to modernise the sound of my score by adding effects like pitch shifting, delays and modern reverbs,” he explains. “I was in awe when I discovered how incredibly virtuosic Bologne was as both a composer and a violinist.”