MARTINU: SYMPHONIES NOS 5 & 6

Personnel includes Steve Hackett, Mitch Dalton (guitar); Charlie Morgan (drums); Andy Pask (bass guitar); David Bristow, David Palmer (keyboards); Stan Saltzman (soprano saxophone); Phil Todd (tenor saxophone); Stephanie De Sykes, Clare Torry, Miriam Stockley, Tony Burrows, Carl Wayne, Ian Hunt (voice).

BRAHMS: SYMPHONY NO 2 DAVIS,

Track Listing
1. In the Still of the Night
2. Always True to You in My Fashion
3. Begin the Beguine
4. I Love Paris
5. So in Love
6. You Do Something to Me
7. I Concentrate on You
8. Wunderbar
9. Another Op'nin, Another Show
10. Anything Goes
11. At Long Last Love
12. Easy to Love
13. It's All Right With Me
14. My Heart Belongs to Daddy
15. You're the Top
16. Night and Day
17. Let's Do It
18. I've Got You Under My Skin
19. Just One of Those Things
20. I Get a Kick Out of You

Artists: Gogi Grant, Howard Keel, Anne Jeffreys, Lena Horne, Eddie Fisher, Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra, Mary Martin, Cole Porter, Norman Luboff Chorus, Della Reese, Mario Lanza, Eartha Kitt, Alfred Drake, Boston Pops, Dinah Shore, Frank Sinatra and Jonah Jones Quartet.

Handel's 12 ''Grand Concertos'' are well served with integral recordings on both period and modern instruments; with the latter the choice is now widened by the completion of the Guildhall String Ensemble's set, two-thirds of which I dealt with in February. My comments on this final disc should be taken together with those in that earlier review, whose conclusions now apply equally to the whole issue. The GSE's taste for quicker tempos is even more evident in the last four concertos (in No. 11 they score five out of five!), though at its most moderate the margins are small, and in no case does one feel that the music is being frog-marched through the exit door, their rather quicker delivery of the Andante of Concerto No. 11 has a delightful lilt that escapes the other groups I discussed in my previous review, who dwell rather more on its expressive qualities. On the whole this is a youthful celebration of Handel at his most buoyant, joyous and good natured, but the graver moments are not overlooked; there is, for instance, a hushed solemnity in the Lento of Concerto No. 10, enhanced by a respectful regard for dynamics which takes the pianissimo down to a finely controlled whisper.

The whole set is, moreover, a celebration of what Handel wrote down, for the GSE are content to resist many temptations (not, I hasten to say, of undesirable kinds) which others accept, to embellish the score or even to seek out inegales; the comfortably audible harpsichordist is too, reluctant to abuse his freedom to ad lib. In the end it comes down, as I wrote in February, to personal taste since each of the mentioned modern-instrument versions has something good to offer; my own leans towards the GSE's, for its freshness (and clean recording), with I Musici on Philips at the opposite end of the pile, but I would not take strong issue with anyone who came to a different conclusion.

-- John Duarte, Gramophone

STRAVINSKY: THE RITE OF SPRING

Villa-Lobos seemed to have a bottomless well of simple, predominantly diatonic, yet affecting tunes, to which his harmonic eclecticism lent an exotic air; there is not one on this recording which is not capable of staying in the memory. Robert Bonfiglio is a most accomplished soloist in every respect... a most enjoyable programme...
-- John Duarte, Gramophone [4/1990]

WAXMAN Sunset Boulevard. Prince Valiant. Peyton Place. A Place in the Sun. The Bride of Frankenstein. To Have and Have Not. Mr. Skeffington. Objective, Burma! Rebecca. The Philadelphia Story. The Two Mrs. Carrolls. Old Acquaintance. Taras Bulba • Charles Gerhardt, cond; Natl PO • RCA 7017 (68:46)


In my review of arkivmusic.com’s reissue of the RCA Erich Wolfgang Korngold The Sea Hawk album ( Fanfare 30:6), I expressed the hope that they would follow it with this Franz Waxman CD as originally conceived by Charles Gerhardt. Well, here it is. To briefly review, Gerhardt planned to consolidate the music of various composers in the RCA Classic Film Score Series when preparing them for CD. This required expanding and reediting the music in order to account for longer CD playing time. The remastered CDs would contain never-released selections, and when music from some films was initially included on different LPs, it was rearranged into longer suites designed to appear on albums devoted to individual composers. Gerhardt only accomplished his fully realized goal in The Sea Hawk and Sunset Boulevard albums. They were the first two releases from the series to appear on CD. These Korngold and Waxman albums retain the truly sensational sound of the original LPs. Subsequently, RCA made the incomprehensible decision to reissue all of the Classic Film Score Series albums (including The Sea Hawk and Sunset Boulevard ) exactly as they appeared on LP with shorter running times, no expanded suites, cheap looking covers, and drastically inferior Dolby-encoded sound. The far superior CD versions of The Sea Hawk , and now, Sunset Boulevard can be identified by their original cover art and the notation that they are remastered by Gerhardt, but not in Dolby-encoded sound. Arkivmusic.com has fortunately chosen to reissue the Gerhardt-supervised versions.


As is the case with The Sea Hawk , this Waxman CD is required listening for anyone with any serious interest in film music. In addition to all the music contained on the original Sunset Boulevard LP, it includes excerpts from Peyton Place, To Have and Have Not, Mr. Skeffington, Objective, Burma!, and The Two Mrs. Carrolls . There is some unbelievable music here, including suites from Waxman’s back-to-back Oscar winning scores for Sunset Boulevard (1950) and A Place in the Sun (1951). In Prince Valiant , Waxman out swashbuckles Korngold in terms of orchestral razzle-dazzle, and “The Creation of the Female Monster” from The Bride of Frankenstein defined an influential standard for spooky horror film music that has never been surpassed. The haunting and intoxicating music from Rebecca will be difficult to get out of your mind once you have heard it. “The Ride to Dubno” from Taras Bulba is a brilliant orchestral showpiece that should be a rousing encore for symphonic or Pops concerts. Everyone, of course, has his or her individual favorites. I would have preferred Gerhardt interpretations of music from The Nun’s Story (especially the imposing Main Title sequence) and Tony Palmer’s concise suite from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde rather than the relatively lightweight selections from To Have and Have Not and The Philadelphia Story.


Concerning Gerhardt’s performances, they are so consistently good that it is virtually inconceivable that anyone will ever conduct this music better. He is greatly aided by the sound, especially in The Sea Hawk and Sunset Boulevard CDs as compiled by Gerhardt. Engineered by Kenneth Wilkinson, they are representative of the fabled acoustics of London’s Kingsway hall (in my opinion, the finest of all recording venues). Along with Sunset Boulevard , ArkivMusic has now also reissued most of the other albums in the RCA Classic Film Score Series exactly as they were formulated in their previous RCA Dolby-encoded CD versions. Conspicuous by their absence are Citizen Kane (Bernard Herrmann) and CDs containing music from John Williams’s Star Wars coupled with the best available interpretation of an extended suite from Close Encounters of the Third Kind , and an amazing performance of excerpts from Return of the Jedi that even manages to make the Ewok mumbo jumbo at the end sound musical. ArkivMusic plans to release them if and when they can get their hands on the original materials. The good news is that there is plenty of great music to be heard on all of these CDs by Korngold, Max Steiner (including the best version of music from Gone With The Wind ), Alfred Newman, Miklós Rózsa, and David Raksin, among others. They all sound pretty good, but I cannot emphasize enough that there is no comparison to the sonic impact of the Gerhardt-supervised Sunset Boulevard and The Sea Hawk CDs, or the analog LPs. We still need someone to rearrange all of these recordings exactly as Gerhardt envisioned in their original non Dolby-encoded sound, or better yet, reissue the whole series on SACD.

FANFARE: Arthur Lintgen

RAVEL: VALSES NOBLES, LA VALSE

TCHAIKOVSKY: SYMPHONY NO 6 JA

RAVEL: ALBORADO DEL GRACIOSO,

MOZART: COMPLETE VIOLA QUINTET

TOSCANINI COLLECTION: BEETHOVE

MICHALA PETRI - THE VIRTUOSO R

Very fortunately, Rachmaninov's consummate genius as a pianist was captured on a number of records. They stand as one of the truly important legacies of the early years of the gramophone industry. In the recordings of his own music one is especially interested to hear how such a grim-looking man could be reconciled with some of the most tender and whimsical pieces ever written for the instrument. It turns out that his interpretations are model in terms of fluent, yet almost classically controlled, expressivity. The subtlety of Rachmaninov's artistry never acted against his very lively attitude towards performance.

After a selection of lesser-known Preludes, each of which contains that miraculously balanced relationship between melody and accompaniment for which the composer-pianist was idolized, there are three of the Etudes-tableaux and the piece Daisies. Whereas two of the former show the grittier and more gaunt side of the Russian, Daisies, by way of contrast, has the feel of a Gershwin song transcription. Its warmth and colour are indescribable.

Three earlier pieces demonstrate just how early in his creative life Rachmaninov was able to find a distinctive style. The dynamic contrasts prescribed in the Humoresque may have been ironed out here in consideration for the recording process, but the latter part of the piece has a power and diablerie that almost outdoes Horowitz. Both the Polka de VR and the Liebesfreud have a far more directly light and gay mood than one normally hears. Everywhere there is a gentle, teasing humour. The Bach, recorded a year before Rachmaninov's death, shows some deterioration in his playing. Of the other transcriptions, the Schubert really is pretty terrible with its highly elaborate accompaniment. The Tchaikovsky, in which there is a melancholy and dreamy use of piano tone, finds the pianist delighting in the pureness of the instrument's sonority.

This anthology includes nearly all the electric 78s that Rachmaninov recorded of his own music. They date from April 1925, the year in which the first electric recordings came into general use, to February 1942. However, nine of the pieces are the product of one's day's sessions in March 1940. Quite naturally, the sound-quality varies a certain amount, as does the amount of surface noise, with the Gopak being about the most primitive. Nevertheless, a definite and individual use of piano tone is apparent in every note that Rachmaninov plays and this consistency itself speaks for the fidelity of the recordings.

-- James Methuen-Campbell, Gramophone [5/1990]