André Previn was music director of the movie, which won 1964’s Best Picture Oscar. “Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison starred in director George Cukor’s adaptation of the hit musical My Fair Lady. Transylvanian March and Embassy Waltz from “My Fair Lady” (Frederick Loewe) It basically tells the story of the picture in 11 minutes, via the background incidental music.” This suite is by Herbert Stothart, based on Arlen’s tunes and some of his own themes. Harold Arlen wrote the songs, and actually had to fight to keep “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in the movie-they thought it held up the action and were going to cut it. Frank Baum’s novel The Wizard of Oz was made in 1939 and is a classic of American cinema. Suite from “The Wizard of Oz” (Herbert Stothart/Harold Arlen) Like the other composers on this album, he aimed to intensify and heighten the dramatic or comedic aspects of a film, or to say what couldn’t be said with dialogue.” But he was a composer of the most serious mindset. It also happens to have a killer tune, as was the emerging fashion in Hollywood at the time-to make a theme tune or a theme song out of a movie. It has all sorts of highly detailed orchestration, very subtle textures that change within a heartbeat. “Director Otto Preminger’s Laura dates from 1944 and is a film noir murder mystery. Within a very short space of time, Korngold was the most admired and imitated composer in Hollywood.” It just so happened that his melodic, highly colorful, late-Romantic idiom was exactly what the movies needed. He didn’t change anything in his compositional style when he arrived from Vienna. For years, people said that Korngold’s music sounded like Hollywood, but André Previn made the point that the opposite is the case-Hollywood sounded like Korngold. The soaring violin theme at the start is archetypal Korngold. “Made in 1939, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex starred Bette Davis and Errol Flynn. Overture from “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” (Erich Korngold) Read on, as John Wilson guides us through each piece on Hollywood Soundstage. “Movie music is just a part of what I do-my dessert, if you like,” he says. The album takes a special place in his wide-ranging discography with Chandos, which includes acclaimed recordings of Copland, Dutilleux, Ravel, and Respighi. ![]() ![]() ![]() “If something’s good and catches my imagination, and I feel that I can do the music justice, then it will enter my repertoire.”Īll of the pieces on Hollywood Soundstage pass the Wilson test with flying colors. “It’s a nod to the studio music departments of Hollywood, in the days when every studio had its own music department,” says Wilson.Īnd although he is classically trained as a musician, Wilson dislikes the boundaries that are often placed between classical compositions and the best of movie music. Hollywood Soundstage pays specific homage not just to composers who wrote great music for the movies, but also to the highly talented individuals behind the scenes-conductors, arrangers, copyists, orchestrators-who made the finished product possible. “I grew up doing amateur Gilbert & Sullivan productions, as well as musical comedies and operettas,” he reveals. “It’s the first album I’ve ever made of film music by itself,” Wilson tells Apple Music, “as opposed to songs or restorations of song-and-dance routines from MGM movies.” Wilson admits to being “by no means a specialist” in film music and got his early whiff of greasepaint from other sources. At first glance, Hollywood Soundstage, featuring film music by legendary soundtrack composers such as Erich Korngold, Franz Waxman, and Max Steiner, might appear to be more of the same. Hollywood of the classical industry, in recent years releasing a string of albums examining the golden era of the all-singing, all-dancing MGM movie musical.
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