Back in the 1970s ace record producer and conductor Charles Gerhardt blessed posterity with a series of LPs that remain touchstones for quality audio and spiffy presentation. No Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, or Tchaikovsky here, though: these were albums of meticulously recorded and passionately played movie scores from the great masters of the past—Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman, Dmitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann, Hugo Friedhofer, and others.
The splendid acoustic of London's Kingsway Hall gave full rein to the jim-dandy National Philharmonic Orchestra, a recordings-only group assembled by Gerhardt from the leading lights of London's five major orchestras. Like the Philharmonia Orchestra of EMI's heyday, the National was a recording engineer's dream come true, fast on its collective feet, virtuoso, and tonally lush. To add to the party, the 1970s mark a high-water point for analog audio recording, in that decade prior to the introduction of digital audio. Well-engineered stuff from the 1970s can hold its own against anything being produced today, including hi-def audiophile fare.
It started with the hit album The Sea Hawk, a compilation of memorable moments from Korngold's best work at Warner Bros. Selections from not only the eponymous title, but also The Adventures of Robin Hood, Anthony Adverse, King's Row, and The Constant Nymph made for a thrilling 40 some-odd minutes of orchestral splendor. Korngold's son George produced not only that album but many more to come, as the series went rapidly into overdrive with titles spilling out of RCA's factories as fast as Gerhardt & Co. could prepare and record them. Albums devoted to Max Steiner, Franz Waxman, Dmitri Tiomkin, and Bernard Herrmann poured forth, together with an intriguing set of albums centering around particular stars. Captain Blood celebrated Errol Flynn's short screen career with scores by virtually every Hollywood great of his era; Now, Voyager gave us a Bette Davis fest. Gerhardt even devoted one entire album to Max Steiner's Gone With the Wind, not only a monarch amongst film scores but one of the highlights of an already luminous series.
Sadly, the Gerhardt film albums have been poorly served by digital re-releases. The first cycle of CDs suffer from Dolby Surround processing. Perhaps they might sound interesting on a system equipped with Dolby processors, but nonetheless that isn't the mix as originally designed by Gerhardt, producer George Korngold, and legendary audio engineer Kenneth Wilkinson. On a two-channel system, those CDs come across as muddied, overheavy in the bass, and artificially plush.
Recently Sony Classical re-released almost the entire series in new remasterings. They're an improvement on the Dolby items, to be sure. But the engineers responsible for the remasterings seem to have a yen for inflated treble. Many of the new CDs suffer from slightly strident sound. It's easily enough tamed by applying a light reduction to the frequency range around 7.5KHz — but that's something of a bother, even if you have to do it only once with ripped CD files.
The best way to experience the Gerhardt film score series in all its glory is via LPs. For one thing, the albums came with lavish inserts filled with information and pictures. While those are duly reproduced for the CDs, they're tiny. The originals are 12" by 12" and thus eminently more readable.
More to the point, however, is the sound. Those gorgeous albums were mastered for LP reproduction, and on high-end modern vinyl playback equipment, their true nature as bedazzling ear candy shines forth unimpeded. Wildly enjoyable, inspiring, uplifting, entertaining, thrilling, and just plain dandy, those 33 1/3 rpm sleigh rides are treats indeed.
Fortunately they appealed mightily to audiophiles, and those are folks who take immaculate care of their records. So a halfway decent looking copy in a used record store has a good chance of being in fine shape sonically. Despite the flimsy RCA Dynaflex discs, the grooves may well sing forth unimpeded once the record has been given a thorough cleaning. At least that's been my experience so far; I have collected almost the entire series on used LPs and have yet to encounter a stinker in the bunch, although once in a while a persistent scratch bears witness to the passage of time.
It's lovely that they've been remastered on CD, even if the remastering isn't absolutely ideal. What they really cry out for is high-def remasterings that can be made available via download or at least on SACD. Better yet, I would jump for joy should one of today's audiophile vinyl houses, say SpeakersCorner, bring out these glorious jewels on immaculately pressed 180 gram vinyl. What an audio banquet that would be!
