Some Parts of ‘Sound of Film’ Are Out of Sync With Program

A film music festival with no “Titanic” suites, no “Star Wars”/”Close Encounters” medleys, no salutes to cinema classics?

No problem.

“The Sound of Film,” a four-city event celebrating the art of film scoring, which began its brief Los Angeles run Thursday at the El Rey Theatre, honors a world not of blockbusters but of some of this century’s most inventive composers from both classical and pop traditions.

But a performance that didn’t include any film music at all?

That was a problem in the case of headliner John Cale. The Velvet Underground co-founder studied as a youth with Aaron Copland (who wrote landmark scores to such films as “Our Town”), and his own film compositions include mentor Andy Warhol’s “Heat” and Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild.” Thursday, though, he merely did a set of non-film songs, with only a few passing references to cinematic inspirations.

Much more fitting was an ensemble led by and playing music of Carter Burwell, whose credits include most of the Coen brothers’ twisted oeuvre and the new “Gods and Monsters.” The chamber-sized reductions, anchored by Burwell’s keyboards and David Torn’s effects-enhanced electric guitar, lacked the orchestral richness of the real thing. Still, there was no loss of emotional content, from the frozen-heartland-of-darkness of “Fargo” to the stirring highland airs of the epic “Rob Roy.”

The L.A. event concludes tonight with two shows: A bill of the band Shudder to Think (performing its song score to “First Love, Last Rites”) and the “Siberian surf rock” group the Red Elvises (“Six-String Samurai”) at the Roxy, and trumpeter-composer Mark Isham (“Quiz Show”) at the Dragonfly.