In October 2010, 78-year-old French film composer Michel Legrand traveled to Moscow to conduct his arrangements of highlights from his lengthy career in recorded performances by the Moscow Virtuosi, a group composed of members of various Moscow symphony and chamber orchestras. The result is the two-CD set, The Music of Michel Legrand, which demonstrates the composer’s versatility in writing for films. It begins, naturally, with the theme from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg), commonly known as “I Will Wait for You,” which first gained international recognition for Legrand in the ’60s. Also included, of course, are versions of music that won him his three Academy Awards, for the song “Windmills of Your Mind” from The Thomas Crown Affair and the scores of Summer of ’42 and Yentl, as well as a treatment from the Emmy-winning score for the TV movie Brian’s Song. Although Legrand has a light touch with symphonic themes, expressed notably in the lush “Gable and Lombard” and the throbbing, suspenseful “The Three Musketeers,” along with a portion of “The Scoundrel” that sounds like it was borrowed from a Haydn symphony, the composer is also adept at bringing in elements of pop and jazz when called for. “Di Gue Ding Ding,” for instance is a soft rock theme with an electric bass and rock drum set, while “Dingo” has a scatting vocalist and “Family Fugue” contains a lengthy jazz piano trio section. It was this mastery of styles that allowed Legrand to succeed as a Frenchman with one foot firmly planted in the Hollywood mainstream, and his music remains appealing in these suites and excerpts, effectively performed in 2010 under his baton. – William Ruhlmann
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