Photo by Howard Owens.
Philip Klein is a successful film composer in Hollywood; still, it's nice to come home again and visit your alma mater.
Especially if the same high school orchestra that helped mold your talent is preparing to debut a piece you wrote and arranged.
"It's very meaningful to me, it's very special," Klein said. "My world in L.A. now. It is so fast-paced. Kind of crazy. So to come back here and just kind of have this moment that feels like a community again, you know, you don't really get that, and to share it with students. It's really special. It means a lot to me that they would even want something from me and that they would take the time to play it so well."
The piece is Flight of the Voyager, which tells the story of Voyager 2. The spacecraft was launched in 2018 and is the first craft to reach Uranus and Neptune and is the second craft to reach interstellar space.
The piece was written specifically for the Pembroke Concert Orchestra to perform. It makes its international debut on May 30th at 6:30 p.m. in the Pembroke Junior-Senior High School Auditorium.
Klein graduated from Pembroke in 2003. He studied trumpet performance and composition at Northwestern University. In 2011, he was selected as one of six fellows with the Sundance Institute's Film Composing Lab. In 2009, he won Best Composing from the ATAS Foundation's College and Television Awards. He was a nominee in 2022 for best original score for an animated film, for Wish Dragon, from the International Film Music Critics. The same group named him Break Through Film Composer of the Year in 2021. He won the Alan Parsons Award in 2022 for Best Original Score Short Film (Who Goes There).
His film credits include Joker, The Mandalorian, Medieval, The Last Full Measure, Cicero in the Winter, and Clones Gone Wild, along with dozens of others where he participated in the scoring or orchestration.
"It's amazing to us that Mr. Klein wrote the piece for Pembroke, and our band director, John Bailey, is wildly excited for our students to get to meet and work with him," said Superintendent Matthew Calderon.
At the rehearsal on Tuesday, Klein was clearly enjoying himself.
"It's a lot of fun for me to be back," Klein said. "First off, I mean, just to be in, in school with them again, and just the energy of seeing a group like that play together. And it's always fun to hear your piece of music played live for the first time. They did great; they worked really hard. And it's not an easy piece."
Photo by Howard Owens.
