Ilan Eshkeri’s “Still Alice” to be performed at Alzheimer’s charity concert

Composer Ilan Eshkeri is proud to announce the concert premiere of the suite of music from the Academy Award® winning film, “Still Alice” on November 25 at St. Leonard’s Church Shoreditch. The charity concert will raise money for the Alzheimer’s Society.

Ilan Eshkeri’s original score for Academy Award winning film “Still Alice” to be performed in a charity concert on November 25th in London. Proceeds of the concert will benefit the Alzheimer’s Society. The concert takes place at St. Leonard’s Church Shoreditch and starts at 7.30pm. Tickets are £18.50 and are available from seetickets.com.

The concert will consist of music from Ilan Eshkeri, and will include a newly composed suite from “Still Alice”, performed for the first time at Shoreditch Church. The music will be performed by the same ensemble (string trio and piano) that recorded the original score for the film.

Of his score to “Still Alice”, Eshkeri says: “Being a film composer you have to be empathetic, you have to imagine what it feels like to be that character, and this is what I have tried to do here, extending the themes from “Still Alice” to create these independent pieces of music. The start of the piece is about family, it is about warmth and love. The variations represent different aspects of life, but all based upon the initial theme. Then the piece moves into losing oneself in brain disease: memories collide, time is no longer linear, reality is within grasp, there are moments of lucidity but then they are lost.”

Eshkeri also wants to promote the healthy effects that playing music has on the brain. Playing an instrument is fun but it also does much more for our mind – it engages almost every part of the brain at once. It is the mental equivalent of a full body workout: visual, auditory and motor abilities are used simultaneously. At the same time the brain works to understand and interpret the emotional content, all with tremendous attention to detail. This cognitive and emotional work creates better connectivity between the brain’s two hemispheres and, in addition, the memory is exercised by learning the music and emotions off by heart. All this means that people who regularly play and listen to music have a sharper and more focused mind!

The “Still Alice” Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is currently available for download on iTunes and Amazon.

About Ilan Eshkeri

Ilan Eshkeri is a British composer and songwriter best known for his concert work, songwriting collaborations, film scores and video game scores. Most recently Eshkeri collaborated with the world-renowned visual artists The Chapman Brothers on their film “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor” and scored Aardman Animations’ “Shaun the Sheep“, as well as writing the songs for the film with Nick Hodgson of the Kaiser Chiefs and Tim Wheeler of Ash.

Eshkeri has also collaborated with KT Tunstall, Tom Odell, Coldplay, Kasabian, Burial, David Gilmour, Annie Lennox and Marius DeVries. He worked with Amon Tobin on a live symphonic performance of his work, wrote the song “Only You” for Sinead O’Connor, worked with Take That on his score to the film “Stardust” and has been commissioned to write for the world-renowned classical pianist Lang Lang.

Recent film work includes “Still Alice” for which Julianne Moore won an Oscar, “Black Sea”, “47 Ronin“, and the Oscar nominated “The Invisible Woman”. Ilan continues to write the music for “Sims”, one of the world’s largest video game franchises. Other films include Oscar winning “The Young Victoria”, “Kick Ass”, “Stardust” and the lovely “Austenland” and “The Snowman and the Snowdog”.

About “Still Alice”

“Still Alice” is the story of Dr. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) a renowned linguistics professor at Columbia University. When words begin to escape her and she starts becoming lost on her daily jogs, Alice must come face-to-face with a devastating diagnosis: early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. As the once-vibrant woman struggles to hang on to her sense of self for as long as possible, Alice’s three grown children must watch helplessly as their mother disappears more and more with each passing day.

The film, directed by Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland, was released in 2014 and garnered an Academy Award for Actress in a Leading Role for Julianne Moore.