SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE -- Horowitz had heard of Shire and seen Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1974 film The Conversation, with a piano-only Shire score that helped create the film’s mystery, tension and melancholy. But it was the music of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three — the ’74 original, with Walter Matthau as the cop negotiating with murderous hijackers of a New York subway car — that turned Horowitz into a rabid fan.
“That was the score that lit me up,” says Horowitz, a bass-playing Berkeley High School grad who studied composition at the California Institute of the Arts and now teaches at San Francisco State University, where Shire plans to be March 14 – 15 to give master classes, converse and perform his far-ranging music with SF State students and faculty.