HBO’s upcoming film The Wizard of Lies, about notorious Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, looks like it’ll be a powerful study of the man behind the $50 billion scam that rocked America. I’m excited. Which is why today Vehlinggo is premiering the aptly named cue “Ponzi Scheme,” off the film’s poignant, electronic-hybrid score by Evgueni and Sacha Galperine.
“A major source of inspiration for us was the symbol of the Ponzi scheme,” Evgueni said in a release. “The cold mathematical pattern of it, the spiral that was set to get bigger and bigger beyond imagination until breaking inevitably into pieces. We tried to translate this mechanical fate into music, with all its strangeness, its suffocation, its absence of humanity.”
Lakeshore Records will release the Wizard score digitally tomorrow, May 19. The film, directed by noted filmmaker Barry Levinson, premieres on May 20 and stars Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer.
The Galperine brothers have previously done the scores for Nine Lives, The Family, and The Past. They also contributed additional music to The Hunger Games.
When crafting this particular score, they had a certain thing in mind.
“Our goal with this score was to find the right musical color palette that would match this extraordinary character and the incomprehensible path [Madoff] chose, taking the people around him, his clients, as well as his own family, on a descent into hell,” Sacha said in a press release.
The Galperine brothers are native Russians, but they relocated to France in 1990 to finish classical music training they’d started in Moscow. The move to France proved fruitful, according to Lakeshore.
Soon after arriving in Paris, Evgueni was drawn to composing film scores, while he was studying symphonic composition and electro-acoustic music at Paris’s National Conservatory. Sacha found an interest in rock and electronic music after receiving a first prize for violin performance at the Conservatory of Versailles, according to Lakeshore.
The brothers recently scored the music for Russian auteur Andrey Zvyagintsev’s new film, Loveless, which was chosen to compete for the Palme d’Or in the main competition section at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The festival kicked off yesterday.
