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FILM MUSIC AND MUSICAL THEATER
updated: 01/23/2006

(By composer):

 

HERRMANN, Bernard:

Suite from "The Kentuckian". Fred Steiner/ National Philharmonic O. (17-18 minutes, I guess

Music from "Down to the Sea in Ships". Fred Steiner/ Ntl. Philharmonic Orch.

FIELDING, Jerry:

The Wild Bunch Composer conducting. [Not quite as memorable and rousing as Sam Peckinpah’s blood-drenched eulogy to cowboy honor, but it works well enough on-screen. Fans of the movie will want it, even though it doesn’t snap and crackle like Enio Morricone’s spaghetti western soundtracks.]

 

FRIEDHOFFER, Hugo:

Suite from "In Love and War". Fred Steiner (Max’s son)/ National Philharmonic of London. T: roughly 15 minutes.

KERN, Jerome:

Centennial Summer. (Time approx. 38 minutes) [This was the great Kern’s final soundtrack, an Otto Preminger period-piece costume drama starring Jeanne Crain, Cornel Wilde, Linda Darnell, Dorothy Gish, and Walter Brennan. Pure Americana fluff, but only a deep-dyed grouch could poor-mouth it.]

MORRIS, John: Mel Brooks’ "High Anxiety" [A cult film that just gets funnier and funnier as time passes. The score’s better than you remember it being.]

 

 

 

NORTH, Alex:

Cleopatra . Composer; unidentified orchestra; MONO; source in excellent condition. [Would it pique your interest if I told you that the North’s score is AT LEAST as gripping and subtly beautiful as the film itself? Nah, I didn’t think so. Let’s say Mr. North did a slick professional job on an assignment that could not have inspired him very deeply. This sounds like Miklos Rozsa with a killer hangover. On the other hand, you gotta love a soundtrack album that has a cut entitled: "Grant me an Honorable Way to Die"…]

 

PREVIN, Andre:

"Ring Around the Rosy" [Invitation to the Dance] composer conducting the MGM Studio Orchestra [Here’s a FIND! This may have been young Previn’s first soundtrack assignment; for a 1956 feel-good Technicolor splurge entitled Invitation to the Dance", directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly, partnered in the big dance numbers with Tamara Toumanova. My source is a near-mint, extremely rare MGM LP; I estimate the playing time for Previn’s segment to be about 24 minutes & change. Not a widely circulated record; I imagine also a highly desirable one for soundtrack collectors and/or Previn fans, among whom I count myself. The music – well, honestly, I haven’t played it yet, having acquired the disc only recently, but one expects it to be appropriate for what the notes describe as a "gay, ultra-sophisticated story". Does it matter? The intrinsic collectability of this LP is huge. I’ll throw in a nice color copy of the album cover with all orders, OK?]

RIDDLE, NELSON (Arranger & orchestrator): THE GREAT GATSBY. [Not even David Merrick could produce a film that was as good a film as Gatsby was a novel, but he came damned close in this opulent 1974 attempt. Robert Redford was fine at the title character (the very essence of Tragic Cool), but Mia Farrow was…well, Daisy is supposed to be elusive and impalpable – the way the zeitgeist of the times was – NOT vapid and pouty and preppy. It’s hard to see a guy like Redford becoming obsessed with such a simpering bulimic (not when he’s surrounded by all them snazzy flappers!). Be that as it may, Riddle compiled and arranged a long medley of period tunes and ballads, making very effective use of Irving Berlin’s haunting "What’ll I do (without you)?" as a leitmotif throughout the picture. Evidently, this soundtrack has become a much-sought-after collectors’ item – a fact I was not aware of until a customer wanted a dub urgently – and it might have taken me years to get around to listing this otherwise. Alas, my Source discs are afflicted with some minor scratches and crackles – just pretend you’re listening to 78s! But the selections don’t sound bad at all and I was able to tune-out the blemishes after the first few seconds. Fifty-one minutes, give or take a few seconds, is mighty short-shrift for a double LP set, but that leaves you 20-odd minutes you can fill up with a shorter selection. Each dub comes with a copy of the contents.]

ROGERS, Richard: Victory at Sea (The Sonic Spectacular Edition). Robert Russell Bennett; RCA Symphony Orchestra. [A friend made me a CD of this and enclosed a note to this effect: I don’t know how they did it on a cheap cassette, but this Victrola tape, which set me back all of two bits at the local Salvation Army store, has some of the fattest, ripest, most vivid sound I’ve ever heard on a commercial cassette tape. This sounds better than the stereo LP, as issued or remastered; the sound-stage is the size of Guadalcanal, tremendously deep and layered; the brass punch through like broadsides from a heavy cruiser; the percussion is almost physically assaulting. It sounds stupendous on my old car speakers! Although he’s not discernibly credited, this alchemy can only be the work of the Maestro, Charles Gerhardt – he was going for "Phase-Four" spectaculars ten years before London came out with that trademark. Skeptical? Just play this dub and man your audio battle station!

And folks, he was right. God, I loved that movie when it first aired on NBC – I was thirteen at the time and so did not know enough to spot the hundreds of glaring historical anachronisms, where newsreel footage from a five-year period is all montaged into a seamless depiction of, say, Pearl Harbor; it kind of ruined the mood when I re-viewed the series a decade later and realized that terrific Pearl Harbor montage was 90% fake stuff interpolated into a few hundred feet of grainy authentic newsreels – I mean, the U.S. sailors are shown pom-pomming away at the diving Jap planes with Oerlikons, an advanced form of anti-aircraft cannon which was not mounted on one single ship at Pearl Harbor (the 20 mm. first appeared in early 1942, as naval units returned Stateside for re-fits). Oh, bugger the authenticity; I and all my male adolescent friends just ate this stuff up. And we ALL rasn out and bought the blue-cover NBC Symphony recording when it came out (mine is unplayable now, but I’d never chuck it out). How magnificent and situational-specific Richard Rodgers’ score was, and still remains today. That haunting waltz melody – we could see our parents "courting" to such wartime background music!

So my friend did us all a service by dubbing this el-cheapo cassette tape on to a CD. It does sound bigger, richer, wider, deeper than the best stereo LP version I’ve heard. The sonics are so engulfing they’re almost scarey. My money goes on Charles Gerhardt, too. But whoever engineered this early-Seventies version was an audio genius – with sound this sensational, hundreds of filecitious details of Bennett’s orchestration become cleanly audible for the first time, while the biggest and loudest battle music passages simply wash across the room like the prop-wash of the Yamato. If you love this score, and you haven’t heard this iteration of the music, you’ll be amazed and grateful, even to that dowdy old whore of a label RCA Victor.]

ROGERS & HAMMERSTEIN: State Fair. Original cast album, w/ Dana Andrews, Vivian Blaine and Dick Haymes.

ROSZA, Miklos:

"Ivanhoe", Suite from. Composer; MGM Studio Orchestra

"Madame Bovary", Suite from. Composer; MGM Studio Orchestra

"Plymouth Adventure", Suite from. Composer; MGM Studio Orchestra

"The Red House" – Concert Suite. Composer; L.A. Studio Orchestra. [Rosza in his best "spooky movie" vein, from a 1947 Film Noir directed by Delmer Daves & starring Edward G. Robinson, Judith Anderson, Rory Calhoun; bizarre and twisted saga of hidden family secrets – makes a rather effective concert suite. Source: a rare and highly sought-after Capitol 10-incher.]

The "Spellbound’ Concerto. Erich Kloss; Nuremburg Symphony orchestra. [Hugely popular stand-alone hit, like the "Warsaw Concerto" only with an ondes Martinot instead of a piano. Should be in every collection of film music.]

 

 

WAXMAN, Franz:

Sunrise at Campobello. Fred Steiner/ Ntl Philharmonic Orch. (NOTE: the above four soundtrack rarities are sensitively conducted and robustly played by the same "National Philharmonic" that Stokowski recorded with. While not the absolute top-drawer examples of these men’s art, they demonstrate a level of sheer dogged craftsmanship that gives them built-in appeal to film-music buffs, of which I definitely am one. HOWEVER, the Source, an otherwise close-to-mint Entr’acte LP of mid-Seventies vintage, does contain three major pops, two of them infuriatingly near the start of the Bernie Herrmann suite. These specks were all-but-invisible when I scarfed up the LP at a yard sale, but the first time my stylus hit ‘em, (at rather a high volume) I was shocked by how loud and brutal they sounded. So you lose maybe 2.5 seconds off the whole album. If you order a burn of the entire contents, I’ll knock off a buck – fair enough?(I promised to inform you of blemishes big enough to compromise your listening pleasure, and I just did.)

 

(By Title):

Caravans (Michael Blatt). [What an unfortunate name for a composer! I can’t tell you whether it’s any better than the ephemeral film or not, because I’ve never been curious enough to pull the LP out and sample it. Hell, I couldn’t do it this time, either, and I’m trying to sell you a copy. For what it’s worth, Source is in virgin condition and the score has an obligatto part for an "ethnic fiddle". I suspect The Wind and the Lion trumps this turkey in every department.]

 

 

"To Have and Have Not" (Ernest Hemingway) Charming example of Golden Age Radio Theater (October 14, 1946), starring Humphrey Bogart & Lauren Bacall!