Classic Film Scores From Naxos
Old Hollywood film scores by composers like Korngold, Steiner, Waxman and Herrmann still have the ability to transport. With their unabashed romantic grandeur, they have found their way, over the years, into the classical canon and into the hearts of millions of listeners. From smoky, angular noir to awestruck, trembling horror-film scores to the anxious churn of Herrmann, gorge yourself on the classical-music equivalent of gourmet buttered popcorn. What else is the summer season for? All at the discount price of $4.99, for the next two weeks, to celebrate Naxos’ 25th anniversary.
Swashbucklers and Swooners
-
Franz Waxman's lush theme for Rebecca is one of the most romantic pieces of music ever to appear in a Hitchcock film. The plangent string theme could be a weepy Rachmaninoff tune, but for the slight fever-chill touch of dissonance tugging at it; the result is uncanny and ecstatically beautiful, a perfect fit for the tragic romance of the 1940 film.
Beasts, Ghouls, and Vampires
-
Steiner's frenzied masterpiece for the 1933 version of King Kong is the mother of all monster-movie scores. The churning of the strings giving way to ominous, fog-shrouded horns and brass; the thundering, tribal kettles; the intrusion of the occasional huge, cheesy gong: It all still sends little thrills of genuine awe up your back. The score is what gave the original King Kong it's operatic sense of tragedy: watch it on mute... and he's just a monkey knocking over toys.
more » -
Chances are, if you listen to Wojciech Kilar's lust-haunted, unrelentingly grim score for Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, you will remember the film as significantly better than it is. All of the diseased romanticism Coppola struggled to pack in around a dewy-eyed and confused-looking Keanu Reeves and a blade-licking, scene-chewing, Frau Helga-wig sporting Gary Oldman spills forth from the score like the Green Mist that the film's character speak of so... portentously. With this work, imbued with the heaving existential dread of Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky, Kilar earned himself a spot in the canon of film-music classics.
more »
Classics & Masterpieces
-
The Swiss composer Arthur Honegger was a prolific scorer in the earliest days of film. The impressive, toweringly bleak one he wrote for 1934's Les Miserables is generally considered to be one of his best. There's no stirring "Black and Red" or rafter-shaking pop ballad "On My Own" to be found here; his work, like the film it accompanies, digs into the baleful reality and despair of its characters' circumstances.
-
Hegemonduson August 1, 2012 at 4:06 am said: More specials like this please! And more in the Jazz and Classical world, too!
