By Andra Moss

The Norfolk Festival switches reels from chamber music to the magic of silent film for its Saturday, Aug. 2 gala event “A Night at the Cinema.” Internationally acclaimed pianist and composer Matan Porat will perform live, improvised soundtracks for three silent era gems in the Norfolk Music Shed, starting at 8 p.m. Tickets can be purchased for the performance only or with a pre-concert gala dinner and post-concert reception with the artist.

Interviewed via Zoom from his home in Berlin, Germany, Porat expressed his enthusiasm for his upcoming week as a guest at the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. He noted that he had met festival director Melvin Chen last summer when they were both on the jury for a piano competition in Cleveland. “We had a great time,” Porat recalled. “When Melvin heard that I do improvisations for silent film, he invited me to the Norfolk Festival.”

Porat’s turn into silent film accompaniment actually came about not far from Norfolk, he said. “I was in my first summer at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont many years ago. [Marlboro artistic director] Richard Goode heard me improvise and suggested I play for a silent movie there.” The experience not only offered an enjoyable variation from his classical work, said Porat, it also reconnected him with one of his early passions, improvisation. “I started as an improviser as a child, even before knowing how to play or write music,” he said. “I would improvise for hours and hours, creating pieces. It was a very big thing for me. I’m happy to have it back.”

An afficionado of cinema of all kinds, Porat has selected three favorite silent films for the Norfolk gala program. The first, “Daisy Doodad’s Dial,” is a 1914 comedy short written and directed by its star, comedienne Florence Turner. Two bits of trivia on Daisy Doodad: it has the little-known distinction of being the very first film by a female American director and “dial” is British slang for one’s face. Viewers will grasp the reference immediately.

A second short film, “Optical Poem,” made in 1938 by Oskar Fischinger, an avant-garde animator, filmmaker and painter, offers a wholly different experience. Imagery of music is represented by colorful geometric shapes dancing across the screen. Fischinger’s mind-boggling visual technique, pre-dating computer graphics by decades, will be further enhanced by Porat’s extraordinary improvisation.

Porat explained that “I’m really the accompanist—not the center of attention but really trying to bring to the movie what the director was aiming for.”

The evening’s feature film is “Sherlock Jr.,” the 1924 whodunnit starring the stone-faced master of silent comedy, Buster Keaton. Said Porat, “It is my favorite film of his. Keaton tests my instincts because it is all going very fast. I need to be extremely exact with how I fit everything he is doing on screen with the music. It is a good challenge to set music to that.” (Keaton famously instructed his camera crews to “Keep filming unless I die.”)

How does Porat prepare for a silent film performance? His reply: “It’s a real improvision. Of course I’ve seen the movies before, so I have a sense of how things go and what direction I’m going to go musically. But every time is very different and goes to new places. I will try to bring three completely different sound walls. We will discover it together.”

Arriving directly from the Horte?nsia Music Festival in the Azores, Porat will spend the week coaching Yale Norfolk chamber music fellows. In addition to the Aug. 2 gala, he will perform Mozart’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor with members of the Shanghai Quartet on Friday, Aug. 1. For more information on both events, visit music-tickets.yale.edu/26027.