I suppose all of us have a private corner of our listening life that is devoted to something a bit off the beaten path, perhaps something we’re not quite so eager to drop into a tony discussion about the merits of the Budapest vs the Emerson string quartets, or the proper ornamentation for Purcell’s keyboard suites. For some folks that might be Eric Coates or Richard Addinsell or John Williams. Others might have a secret yen for Jimmy Dean, Patti Page, or Liberace.
Me, I love classic movie scores, particularly in modern-day reconstructions played to the nines by big orchestras and recorded in rich, glorious stereo sound. I’m not alone in this. Boy, am I not alone. An entire subsection of the recording industry has devoted itself to my willingness to open my wallet for grand reconstructions of great old-time movie scores. Conductors have practically made their careers on it.
I can point to three conductor/orchestra combos in particular as having the most sterling track record when it comes to resuscitating movie scores. All of their recordings are available, although given the vagaries of distribution, some might pop in and out of print over the years. So here’s a look at those three most industrious and productive spinners of movie magic. Any albums I mention in this article are currently in my collection; I’m not presenting complete discographies.
Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic
During the mid-1970s, Gerhardt took a crackerjack pickup orchestra—not to be confused with today’s fine Maryland-based National Philharmonic, by the way—through a set of gorgeously recorded collections of film music for RCA Victor. Although those albums slipped out of sight for a while, they were brought out on well remastered CDs. Then those went out of print, drat it all. But three cheers for those fine folks at ArkivMusic.com, who ensured via their ArkivCD reprint series that the Gerhardt/National film score recordings stayed around. You almost can’t praise these spiffy albums enough; just the audio quality alone, from the last decade of analog recording, is worth the purchase price.
Most of the Gerhardt recordings are compilations, typically devoted either to a single composer, or to movies associated with a particular actor. Gerhardt recorded a complete score for an album only rarely—Gone with the Wind and King Kong being the only two I can think of.
Compilations of a particular composer’s work include:
Captain from Castile: The Classic Film Scores of Alfred Newman
Citizen Kane: The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Herrmann
Elizabeth and Essex: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Lost Horizon: The Classic Film Scores of Dimitri Tiomkin
The Sea Hawk: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Spellbound: The Classic Film Scores of Miklos Rozsa
Sunset Boulevard: The Classic Film Scores of Franz Waxman
Now Voyager: The Classic Film Scores of Max Steiner
Those albums centering around film scores for a particular actor:
Captain Blood: Classic Film Scores for Errol Flynn
Classic Film Scores for Bette Davis
Every album is filled with fascinating moments. Among my favorites: the lush treatment of Wuthering Heights in the Alfred Newman album, the use of a full men’s chorus in The Sea Hawk from the Errol Flynn album, the extended suite from Lost Horizon in the Dimitri Tiomkin album, the long creation sequence from The Bride of Frankenstein in the Franz Waxman album, and basically every moment of the Miklos Rosza album, to my mind the overall series best. But there’s sure to be something for everybody in these wonderful albums; if you haven’t heard Max Steiner’s enormous Gone With the Wind score played by a modern orchestra, you haven’t been living life to its fullest.
Joel McNeely and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra
McNeely, an energetic and perceptive conductor at the helm of a major orchestra, delivers complete film scores on long albums, as a result you get everything from soup to nuts in pristine digital recordings. They’re delightful albums, albeit with a very spotty distribution and release history. Many of the CDs have already moved into collector’s status, which is a pity. They deserve to be more widely heard, and given their sonic quality, they really should be up on one of the high-end audio download sites like Passionato or HDTracks.
One of McNeely’s specialties has been the music of Bernard Herrmann, and to that end he has produced a first-rate series of Hitchcock and Harryhausen albums.
Citizen Kane (Herrmann)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (Herrmann)
Vertigo (Herrmann)
Marnie (Herrmann)
Psycho (Herrmann)
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (Herrmann)
Rebecca (Waxman)
Sunset Blvd. (Waxman)
The real standout is The Day the Earth Stood Still, its pioneering sci-fi score complete with eerie theremin swoops, heard to immense effect in modern stereo as opposed to the flat, grainy sound of the early 1950s movie with Michael Rennie and Patricia Neal. But all the McNeely/SNO albums are delightful, and if you itch to bathe yourself in wildly untamed passion, there’s just nothing like cranking up McNeely’s blazingly erotic Vertigo.
William Stromberg and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra
A Russian orchestra seems like an odd choice for film score recordings, but on the whole they do a very nice job. Musically the Stromberg recordings tend to run a little less polished than the Gerhardt or McNeely albums; I often get the feeling that the albums were made in a single session or two, everybody more or less sightreading. And since this isn’t the Philharmonia Orchestra or the London Symphony (both famous for being able to pull of miracles at sight), sometimes the strain shows. Tempi can run a bit slow compared to the movie originals on occasion, little details of intonation and ensemble may come up short here or there.
But those are minor gripes. These recordings offer meticulous restorations of their materials, often of scores which might not be heard otherwise. And you can’t beat Stromberg’s sheer range of materials, all the way from classics like The Adventures of Robin Hood and King Kong to delectably tacky monster-movie albums such as House of Frankenstein. In particular, Stromberg and his Muscovites have done yeoman duty in bringing back wonderful scores from the less-famous Hollywood composers such as Adolph Deutsch, and have presented them in fine modern performances. Hearing that old-time Universal signature tune from 1930s monster flicks played by a modern orchestra is an absolute hoot.
King Kong (Max Steiner)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (Erich Wolfgang Korngold)
The Maltese Falcon (includes The Mask of Dimitrios, High Sierra, Northern Pursuit, and George Washington Slept Here, all by Adolph Deutsch)
Red River (Dimitri Tiomkin, one of the all-time triumphs of Hollywood film scoring)
The Sea Hawk, and Deception (Erich Wolfgang Korngold)
The Egyptian (Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman)
The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Bernard Herrmann, also includes 5 Fingers)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (Max Steiner)
All This and Heaven Too (Max Steiner, includes A Stolen Life)
Garden of Evil (Bernard Herrmann)
House of Frankenstein (Felix Salter and Paul Dessau)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Alfred Newman, also includes Beau Geste)
Monster Movie Music (Felix Salter and Frank Skinner, includes Son of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man)
The Ones I Left Out
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the superb Rumon Gamba, who has specialized particularly in British film music, bringing back to life scores by folks such as William Alwyn, Richard Addinsell, Arthur Bliss, and Ralph Vaughan Williams; he has also recently done a knockout album of Citizen Kane, helming no less than the BBC Philharmonic, unquestionably one of the planet’s best bands. Perhaps I’ll write another article on his albums. Other odds and ends can be found all over the place; for example, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the LA Philharmonic gifted us with a dandy album of Herrmann stuff, Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham gave us Peter Doyle’s superlative score to Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V, and no less than Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields produced a winning rendition of Walton’s score to Olivier’s Henry V with Christopher Plummer providing the narration.
And of course, the composers themselves left some of their scores—Steiner, Waxman, Korngold, Herrmann, Rosza, Elmer Bernstein, John Williams, and the rest. Many of those remain available, although of course in most cases the recordings aren’t exactly hi-fi spectaculars.