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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Track Listings
| 1 | Dangerous Moonlight: Warsaw Concerto |
| 2 | The Case of the Frightened Lady: Portrait of Isla |
| 3 | Spellbound: Spellbound Con |
| 4 | The Glass Mountain: The Legend of the Glass Mountain |
| 5 | Murder on the Orient Express: Theme and Waltz |
| 6 | Love Story: Cornish Rhap |
| 7 | Hangover Square: Con Macabre |
| 8 | While I Live: The Dream of Olwen |
| 9 | Midnight on the Cliffs: Midnight on the Cliffs |
Product details
- Is Discontinued By Manufacturer : No
- Product Dimensions : 5.63 x 4.69 x 0.43 inches; 3.53 Ounces
- Manufacturer : Naxos
- Original Release Date : 1998
- SPARS Code : DDD
- Date First Available : December 8, 2006
- Label : Naxos
- ASIN : B0000060DC
- Number of discs : 1
- Best Sellers Rank: #129,818 in CDs & Vinyl (See Top 100 in CDs & Vinyl)
- #1,558 in Movie Scores (CDs & Vinyl)
- #1,850 in Classical Concertos
- #3,827 in Chamber Music (CDs & Vinyl)
- Customer Reviews:
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 25, 2017
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 15, 2008
This excellent collection is for those who like their music to get to the good parts real fast! Right "off the bat" these short gems are giving you "the meat of things" - They are mini masterworks of piano and orchestral drama beautifully played by Philip Fowke and the RTE' Concert Orchestra; 74 mins of "state of the art" recording by the great NAXOS company (which also means that it is very reasonably priced).
This collection's loaded (Bernard Herrmann, Rosza, Rota, Addinsell & more) with brilliant composers at their most brilliant - It could be called concertos for those with short attention spans, the longest being just short of twelve mins. - "Concerto Macabre" by Herrmann for HANGOVER SQUARE (1945) was written for the film itself - other compositions were written after the film and score were completed (taken from the main themes) "Spellbound Concerto" by Miklos Rozsa from SPELLBOUND was possibly written to fit onto a 78 RPM record (thus the short length).
I've enjoyed this collection so much, and it's at such a reasonable price, that I've been able to send several off to friends - It's that kind of music, you want to share it.
This collection's loaded (Bernard Herrmann, Rosza, Rota, Addinsell & more) with brilliant composers at their most brilliant - It could be called concertos for those with short attention spans, the longest being just short of twelve mins. - "Concerto Macabre" by Herrmann for HANGOVER SQUARE (1945) was written for the film itself - other compositions were written after the film and score were completed (taken from the main themes) "Spellbound Concerto" by Miklos Rozsa from SPELLBOUND was possibly written to fit onto a 78 RPM record (thus the short length).
I've enjoyed this collection so much, and it's at such a reasonable price, that I've been able to send several off to friends - It's that kind of music, you want to share it.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 24, 2015
I bought this primarily for the "Warsaw Concerto," and it is performed as well as can be expected. This is a work that could be heard in concert more often. I have long known of the "Spellbound Concerto" (from Hitchcock's "Spellbound"), which is another romantic sounding concerto that features an instrument known as the theriman-which exudes a weird, other-worldly sound. Most of the concertos are based on basic music and themes from the respective movies and are "arranged" to create cohesive pieces. They are not always exactly what you would hear in the movies. So, just enjoy the works for themselves. I think they are enjoyable. Most of the concertos are trying to emulate the music of Rachmaninoff. It is interesting to hear how composers can sound like Rachmaninoff and yet create their own works. I also like the selection from "Murder on the Orient Express." The introduction sounds jazzy--like in a nightclub, before it goes into the main waltz. Musicianship and sound quality are fine.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 16, 2017
My love of piano concertos dates back to the 1950s, when I had an LP of Mantovanti film music, which has been reissued on CD as
Music From The Films
. That album contains three tracks, including the Warsaw Concerto, that are found on this album, wonderfully performed by Philip Fowke. I ordered this album rather than the Mantovani because of the updated sound. You won't be disappointed.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 6, 2014
Entertaining and interesting .... movies with great piano concertos --- saddly --- are no longer popular. The public, therefore, misses to learn and enjoy great music. Examples: The Seventh Veil, Intermezzo, A Song to Remember and many others. The stories per se, may have been silly, (tear jerkers) but, the music, always sublime, Rachmaninoff, Grieg, Tchaikovsky ... etc, magnificent piano concerti! No more ...
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 9, 2012
I bought this album to hear the Warsaw Concerto and was very pleased. The bonus was all the other piano concerto movie themes that stirred memories of great classic movies from my boyhood. Not only is the selection of music outstanding, but the recording quality and musicality are wonderful. I hope you buy this and listen to it often as I have and that it brings you the same satisfaction I got in purchasing this, now one of my favorite CDs. Highly recommended!
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 7, 2016
Warsaw Concerto is one of my favorite piano works. It is easily on the same level as Gershwin's great classical pieces and is one I can listen to again and again. It is often played on our local classical station here in Fort Worth/Dallas.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 14, 2013
I bought this CD for "Warsaw Concerto" alone; the rest of the collection is great, but "Warsaw" is special to me. I grew up in a family of pianists; I knew my mom's moods by the type of music she played, and she played this wonderfully!
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J C E Hitchcock
4.0 out of 5 stars
Likely to appeal to anyone who likes classically-styled film music.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 3, 2016
Apart from the fact that they were all British films made during the 1940s, and that all feature a composer as one of the main characters, what do “Dangerous Moonlight”, “The Glass Mountain” and “While I Live” have in common? The answer is that all three films feature a piece of music, supposedly written by the film’s fictitious composer, which today is far better known than the film itself. Richard Addinsell’s “Warsaw Concerto” from “Dangerous Moonlight” has become so well-known that it has virtually entered the standard classical repertory, and Nino Rota’s “The Legend of the Glass Mountain” and Charles Williams’ “The Dream of Olwen” are not far behind it in popularity.
In fact, few of the films featured on this disc are well-known today in their own right; the main exceptions are probably Hitchcock’s classic “Spellbound” and “Murder on the Orient Express”. Despite the reference to “Love Story” on the cover, the disc does not include Francis Lai’s famous score to the 1970 American film with Ryan O’Neill and Ali McGraw. The “Love Story” involved here is a particularly obscure British film of the same name from 1945.
This album features only works written specifically for the movies and excludes well-known concertos (e.g. Mozart’s 21st in “Elvira Madigan” or Rachmaninoff’s 2nd in “Brief Encounter”) which were later used as part of a film’s soundtrack. Although it is entitled “Piano Concertos from the Movies”, none of the pieces included here is a three-movement concerto in the traditional sense. All are single-movement concertante works, with the longest around twelve minutes in length and some considerably shorter than that. Not all of these works, in fact, appear on the disc in the version which we actually hear in the film. In “The Glass Mountain” itself, for example, Rota’s famous melody is heard as an operatic aria; he later arranged it for piano and orchestra. Similarly, Miklos Rozsa’s “Spellbound Concerto” is a later reworking by the composer of themes which do indeed occur in his film score, but not in concerto form.
Apart from “Murder on the Orient Express” from 1974, all of the films involved were made between 1940 and 1956. I have not seen all of them- indeed, before buying this CD I had not even heard of some of them- but to judge from the sleeve notes most of them are lurid melodramas involving murder, madness and mayhem, or at least illicit passion. (A note of caution. The sleeve notes, at least in the English language version, are not always reliable. For example, the synopsis given of “While I Live”, one of the films I have seen, is misleading in several respects, although this may be the result of sloppy writing rather than a faulty memory of the plot).
Given the melodramatic nature of many of these films, it is not surprising that the music is equally melodramatic. Richard Rodney Bennett’s music for “Murder on the Orient Express” is in a jazz idiom appropriate to the film’s interwar setting, but with that one exception all of these pieces are written in a late Romantic style reminiscent of Rachmaninoff. Indeed, according to the sleeve notes the producers of “Dangerous Moonlight” were originally hoping to use one of the great man’s own concertos on the soundtrack, but because of delay in obtaining the necessary rights asked Addinsell to turn out something in a similar vein. (This also entailed rewriting the script to make the film’s hero a composer as well as a concert pianist).
The idea of a four-minute piano concerto sounds like something of a contradiction in terms, and my favourite pieces on this album are probably the longer ones, Addinsell’s, Rozsa’s and Bernard Hermann’s “Concerto Macabre” from “Hangover Square”, in which the composers take more time to develop their ideas. I had previously known Hermann as the composer of austere, modernist music for films like “Psycho” and “Taxi Driver”, and whereas those two scores work well in the context of the films for which they were written, I doubt if they would transfer well to the concert hall. This piece, however, came as something of a surprise; although it certainly contains spookily Gothic elements in line with its title, is for the most part written in a similar style to most of the others on this disc.
Of the shorter pieces, I would single out “The Legend of the Glass Mountain” and “The Dream of Olwen” for the beauty of their melodies, although I still think that the former sounds better as the operatic duet we hear in the movie itself. With some of the others, however- and here I am thinking of “Portrait of Isla” and Hubert Bath’s “Cornish Rhapsody” - there seemed to be a curious disconnect between the style of the work and its form. Those portentous opening bars and crashing chords promised much but ended up delivering little, putting me in mind of mountains labouring and bringing forth a mouse.
I would normally end a review by giving my overall opinion of the disc as a whole, but that is difficult when it features numerous works by different composers, some of which I liked and others which I did not. At least one of these pieces, however, and quite possibly more, is likely to appeal to anyone who likes classically-styled film music.
In fact, few of the films featured on this disc are well-known today in their own right; the main exceptions are probably Hitchcock’s classic “Spellbound” and “Murder on the Orient Express”. Despite the reference to “Love Story” on the cover, the disc does not include Francis Lai’s famous score to the 1970 American film with Ryan O’Neill and Ali McGraw. The “Love Story” involved here is a particularly obscure British film of the same name from 1945.
This album features only works written specifically for the movies and excludes well-known concertos (e.g. Mozart’s 21st in “Elvira Madigan” or Rachmaninoff’s 2nd in “Brief Encounter”) which were later used as part of a film’s soundtrack. Although it is entitled “Piano Concertos from the Movies”, none of the pieces included here is a three-movement concerto in the traditional sense. All are single-movement concertante works, with the longest around twelve minutes in length and some considerably shorter than that. Not all of these works, in fact, appear on the disc in the version which we actually hear in the film. In “The Glass Mountain” itself, for example, Rota’s famous melody is heard as an operatic aria; he later arranged it for piano and orchestra. Similarly, Miklos Rozsa’s “Spellbound Concerto” is a later reworking by the composer of themes which do indeed occur in his film score, but not in concerto form.
Apart from “Murder on the Orient Express” from 1974, all of the films involved were made between 1940 and 1956. I have not seen all of them- indeed, before buying this CD I had not even heard of some of them- but to judge from the sleeve notes most of them are lurid melodramas involving murder, madness and mayhem, or at least illicit passion. (A note of caution. The sleeve notes, at least in the English language version, are not always reliable. For example, the synopsis given of “While I Live”, one of the films I have seen, is misleading in several respects, although this may be the result of sloppy writing rather than a faulty memory of the plot).
Given the melodramatic nature of many of these films, it is not surprising that the music is equally melodramatic. Richard Rodney Bennett’s music for “Murder on the Orient Express” is in a jazz idiom appropriate to the film’s interwar setting, but with that one exception all of these pieces are written in a late Romantic style reminiscent of Rachmaninoff. Indeed, according to the sleeve notes the producers of “Dangerous Moonlight” were originally hoping to use one of the great man’s own concertos on the soundtrack, but because of delay in obtaining the necessary rights asked Addinsell to turn out something in a similar vein. (This also entailed rewriting the script to make the film’s hero a composer as well as a concert pianist).
The idea of a four-minute piano concerto sounds like something of a contradiction in terms, and my favourite pieces on this album are probably the longer ones, Addinsell’s, Rozsa’s and Bernard Hermann’s “Concerto Macabre” from “Hangover Square”, in which the composers take more time to develop their ideas. I had previously known Hermann as the composer of austere, modernist music for films like “Psycho” and “Taxi Driver”, and whereas those two scores work well in the context of the films for which they were written, I doubt if they would transfer well to the concert hall. This piece, however, came as something of a surprise; although it certainly contains spookily Gothic elements in line with its title, is for the most part written in a similar style to most of the others on this disc.
Of the shorter pieces, I would single out “The Legend of the Glass Mountain” and “The Dream of Olwen” for the beauty of their melodies, although I still think that the former sounds better as the operatic duet we hear in the movie itself. With some of the others, however- and here I am thinking of “Portrait of Isla” and Hubert Bath’s “Cornish Rhapsody” - there seemed to be a curious disconnect between the style of the work and its form. Those portentous opening bars and crashing chords promised much but ended up delivering little, putting me in mind of mountains labouring and bringing forth a mouse.
I would normally end a review by giving my overall opinion of the disc as a whole, but that is difficult when it features numerous works by different composers, some of which I liked and others which I did not. At least one of these pieces, however, and quite possibly more, is likely to appeal to anyone who likes classically-styled film music.
11 people found this helpful
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Miss Christine Mary Marchant-Hubbard
5.0 out of 5 stars
Music
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 28, 2022
Perfect, just what i wanted! Love the 'Glass Mountain' always have! Soothing music for down times. Happy music for high times. Music for all times really.
C. M. Casmore
3.0 out of 5 stars
Warsaw Concerto
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 21, 2011
Sound quality leaves a lot to be desired.
Seems like it was taken from the actual film, as sound quality is very poor, not up to the usual quality you would expect from NAXOS.
Would not recommend it to anybody that hopes for a digital sound!!
Seems like it was taken from the actual film, as sound quality is very poor, not up to the usual quality you would expect from NAXOS.
Would not recommend it to anybody that hopes for a digital sound!!
3 people found this helpful
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Srebe
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dramatic film scores
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 11, 2015
An excellent modern recording of some well known film soundtracks from the 1940s and 50s. Very dramatic interpretation by the concert pianist and superb blending of the orchestra.
L Clifton
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great product
Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 10, 2020
Great condition
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