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Richard Addinsell's Warsaw Concerto (from the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight) is the most famous piece here and has held a small place in the classical repertoire for over seventy years now, mostly in classical pops concerts. It is available on a number of collections of works for piano and orchestra and I have Christa Ortiz doing it on Decca with some Rachmaninov and Shostakovich. But this collection is special in that it compiles similar works for piano and orchestra written for films. This makes it a great gift to film score collectors since most of these pieces are very rare and mostly unavailable elsewhere. Also, the accompanying pieces sustain the mood better than most of the classical collections.
This type of cinematic piano concerto-like rhapsody was quite a fad for a while, mostly in the 1940's and they received radio airplay. The Warsaw Concerto was such a huge hit that it sold over a million 78's and had featured Louis Kentner, the famous concert pianist. Like most of these it was modeled after Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto which itself was one of the most popular classical pieces in the 40's, a time when the general public knew many of the more famous classical compositions. Big and romantic with resounding chords, Rcahmaninov wrote it as a triumphal return after a long depression and writer's block. In fact the film makers wanted to use that work but the composer would not give permission. So they did the next best thing and turned to film composer Addinsell who had recently done well with Goodbye Mr. Chips. It was intended to imitate the sound of the Rachmaninov and orchestrator Roy Douglas kept a copy of the sheet music of Rachmaninov's Second nearby.
Such a success created an audience demand for more like it. Like the Warsaw Concerto most of these works were played in snippets throughout the films they were in and these are the recording and concert versions of the works. In most cases the music has far outlived the films, which are mostly forgotten. The most famous besides the Warsaw are Hupert Bath's Cornish Rhapsody and Charles Williams Dream of Olwen. Both films deal with classical composers (one alive and one dead) and both take place in Cornwall. The music is pure romantic film music and have not a hint of Cornish folk music or anything like that. Both pieces are big and sweeping with the Cornish Rhapsody brightly suggesting waves crashing on the cliffs and the Dream of Olwen more melancholy and a bit like Brahms in its middle before a rather Gershwin-like ending.
Three quite famous film composers are represented here. Miklos Rozsa, most famous for epics like Ben Hur but was able to write in practically any other vein as well. His Spellbound Concerto, a psychological thriller with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman contains an early use of the theremin, an electronic instrument which became a science fiction staple in the 50's. In Spellbound it accompanied the eerie dream sequences designed by Salvador Dali. Nino Rota, later famous for scoring Fellini films and The Godfather turns in a work both passionate and tender. Bernard Herrmann scored many of Hitchcock's films and his Concerto Macabre from Hangover Square is one of the real highlights of the disc. The film concerned a mad composer who is also, unknown to himself, a serial killer (amnesia, a popular plot device of the time is used in several of these films). Thus the dissonance of its opening, a theme that plays whenever he is about to kill. This is the darkest of the works here and has a wonderful climax that seems to echo Wagner's Tristan, something he would do later in his score for Vertigo. I still remember the film's ending with the now totally mad composer playing his concerto on stage with the concert hall burning down around him.
Richard Rodney Bennett's Murder On the Orient Express is the one piece from the 70's here, though it is written in the grand romantic style of the other pieces. It's robust waltz helps add variety to the disc. Most of these pieces open with heavy resounding chords and remain rhapsodic so this breaks things up nicely. Jack Beaver wrote many British film scores in the 30's including Hitchcock's original 39 Steps. His Portrait of Ilsa is from a Gothic thriller and is appropriately mysterious. Leonard Pennario was a famous concert pianist himself. His Midnight On the Cliffs is much like the other works here and easily suggests cliffs and waves.
It looks like Naxos has a nicely informative booklet that might reiterate some of what I included in my review. I ordered mine from an Amazon seller in Germany and got a booklet in German so I don't know what it says. The sound is very good and pianist Philip Fowke and the RTE Concert Orchestra give it all they've got, which is what you have to do with these kinds of pieces. A really fun disc.
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J C E Hitchcock
Likely to appeal to anyone who likes classically-styled film music.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 3, 2016Miss Christine Mary Marchant-Hubbard
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 21, 2011
