Legendary Hollywood

構成数 : 1枚
合計収録時間 : 00:56:50
Personnel: David King (organ). Liner Note Author: Christopher Palmer. Recording information: All Saints Church, Tooting, London, England; Kings College Chapel, Cambridge, England. Arranger: Christopher Palmer. Dimitri Tiomkin had a tendency to over-score the films he worked on, which may have been one reason why producers liked his work -- in the absence of Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann, and Alfred Newman, they still always felt they were getting their money's worth by the bar and the measure. This attribute also made his music translate well onto vinyl and even better onto CD, where the playback could capture more of the music. This CD, a superior reissue of a 1980s disc from England, is primarily devoted to Tiomkin's later, bigger-scale scores, which can be extremely uneven within the same soundtrack. Such is the case with the opening track, The Guns of Navarone, which works reasonably well until it lapses, in Max Steiner fashion, into a national anthem or two -- not even all of Steiner's scores survived such transitions, and Tiomkin was no Steiner. "A President's Country," assembled for a 1966 documentary film about President Lyndon Johnson, draws its material from Tiomkin's scores for Giant, High Noon, Red River, The Alamo, his theme from Rawhide, and the erotic melodrama Duel in the Sun. It all hangs together amazingly well and sometimes in surprising fashion (though one wishes there were more quoted from Red River), and the playing here is often fairly broad and unsubtle, but effective. "Rhapsody of Steel," written for a 1959 U.S. Steel-sponsored animated film about the history of steel, is the longest piece here, a 22-minute account of the complete score, which properly belongs on a classical program, being a quasi-symphonic work (essentially in two movements, one of them a very charming scherzo) built around images of metallurgy going back thousands of years and evolving to the present of the film. The scores for Wild Is the Wind (the main theme of which became a hit song in the hands of Johnny Mathis) and The Fall of the Roman Empire, done in an admirably broad, bracing, and robust way, round out this disc in more modestly proportioned tracks. Astonishingly, the recording is the work of Sir David Willcocks -- a conductor much more closely associated with choral music from the 1700s to the present day -- and the Royal College of Music Orchestra, which plays the material like veteran Hollywood hands, with none of the excessive gentleness that can mar professional orchestras' attempts at film music re-recordings. The audio, 24-bit digital remaster from the original 10-bit digital (on the 1980s-vintage Unicorn-Kanchana release of this material) is excellent. ~ Bruce Eder
録音 : ステレオ (Studio)