MOVIE MEMORIES: A GOLDEN AGE REVISITED

VARIOUS

Rating:

Original Review: A nice enough record, but one which will be completely and utterly redundant for 99% of the world's film score fans. The suites of music for this album were conducted by Grammy winner Richard Kaufman, whose list of achievements to date include being one of the principals of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and the Pacific Symphony, and will probably be best known to score fans for the albums he produced with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra of music by Alfred Newman and Victor Young. All this is well and good, but the problem as a whole with an album such as this is that Kaufman has chosen to re-record what are, for all intents and purposes, 15 of the best-known themes in cinema history.

This single fact is the biggest problem with the concept of a whole. With just two exceptions (Victor Young's Around The World in 80 Days and Dimitri Tiomkin's High Noon), I already owned either the full score, or a large proportion of the music, for every film represented. Think about it: the Raiders March? The Magnificent Seven? Doctor Zhivago? Tara's Theme? Colonel Bogey? Any self-respecting film score fan whose collection doesn't contain most of these scores already should go home and hang their head in shame. In the end, Kaufman might well have just whacked Star Wars, Lawrence of Arabia and the James Bond theme on there and made his compilation of the world's most familiar film music complete.

To give Kaufman his due, the performances are all superb, and the music itself is excellent. That's why they are regarded as classic pieces. Some of the pieces have been slightly re-orchestrated by Kaufman to give them a slightly different slant, and some of the themes have been fleshed out to enable them to be performed by a larger symphony orchestra, but by and large they are left in their original form. It's particularly gratifying to see some of Jerry Goldsmith's slightly lesser-known music receiving the star treatment, although the peculiar pairing of Poltergeist and Papillon doesn't quite gel together as a coherent suite, and Carol Anne's Theme is so much the weaker without the child's chorus. Richard Rodney Bennett's glorious, near-legendary waltz from Murder on the Orient Express is one of the album's highlights, cleverly mimicking by way of its timpani rhythm the sound and motion of the titular train as it departs from the station.

Max Steiner's surprisingly powerful and evocative music from Casablanca may come as a little surprise to those who think that the only piece worth mentioning is "As Time Goes By", which was actually written by a little-known composer named Herman Hupfeld; the rendition of Alex North's "Unchained Melody" from Ghost is lovely, but sounds infinitely better when accompanied by the glorious vocals of The Righteous Brothers; and I still can't listen to Colonel Bogey without making up a rhyme in my head about Adolf Hitler. The only real misfire is the rather limp performance of Maurice Jarre's theme from Doctor Zhivago, which greatly misses the evocative strains of the balalaika which so captured the world's attention back in 1965.

I must also make a point about the actual title of the album itself: A Golden Age Revisited. By my understanding, cinema's golden age took place between 1930 and 1959, when composers like Alfred Newman, Miklós Rózsa, Bernard Herrmann and Max Steiner dominated the film music world. Steiner is represented by two tracks, and there are selections Dimitri Tiomkin and Victor Young, but since when have movies from 1981 (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and 1990 (Ghost) constituted the golden age? If you're going to give your album a name, at least do a little bit of research beforehand.

It surprises me that Varčse Sarabande green-lighted this project in the first place, given their lack of funds and their regular claims that they cannot afford to release more scores due to re-use fees and the like. According to the CD's small print, it's taken five years for this music to be released, following its recording back in 1995. I, and I presume many of the world's film music fans, would quite happily have foregone Movie Memories: A Golden Age Revisited if it meant that other scores could have been released, or more music could have been included on something else. Without wanting to detract from the efforts of Mr. Kaufman and the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, and although the music is consistently excellent, I doubt whether I will ever listen to this CD again.

Track Listing: Running Time: 69 minutes 40 seconds

Varčse Sarabande VSD-6124 (2000)

Music conducted by Richard Kaufman. Performed by The Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra. Recorded and mixed by Peter Collmann. Edited by Karin Frank. Album produced by Richard Kaufman.

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