Rozsa vs. Gladiator

By Michael Ware

Miklos Rozsa's Violin Concerto received a worthy recording by Robert McDuffie with Yoel Levi and the Atlanta Symphony on a powerful new Telarc disc (CD-80518). Much has been written of the great composer's avowed thirst for maintaining his private line of absolute music in parallel to his unmatched career as a dramatist. The fiercely uncompromised attack of his concert writing complemented his equally vital and profoundly penetrating film work as unified facets of a lifetime's exploration of what it is to live. It is perhaps no leap of concentration to know that regardless of the context for which Rozsa's music was composed, the expression remains indelibly that of one man's singular blaze of insight.

The Violin Concerto, Opus 24, was composed in 1953-54 for Jascha Heifetz and performed to acclaim with Walter Hendl conducting the Dallas Symphony. A recording was made in 1956, marred to some tastes by an allegedly slapdash (or merely professional) quality in the playing. Whatever expeditious defects are revealed, the piece is still carried to a tight statement of authority and invigorating, soaring lyricism I can still FEEL in the gut though I haven't heard the recording in years. Heifetz' strength and perfect tone ignites the youthful searching of the beginning and powers the third section to a searing strata of light it would be difficult for any player to match let alone surpass. The illustrious reputation of one of the great modern violinists is of course only half the issue with Rozsa's essentially straightforward but multi-planed tonal complexity presenting a vast minefield of challenges few performers and conductors have really resolved.

The new performance by McDuffie with Levi's direction of the Atlanta Symphony slides into the opening section with a sleek coolness of tone that signals a willingness to inhabit this work with an ardor that proves captivating. The aforementioned lyricism never is allowed to flower into an obvious Lush Romanticism and is given an appropriate steely tension that earns the movement with direct passion. The Hungarian, even Gypsy-like roots of the Allegro non troppo ma passionato are taken to with a fervor nearly copasetic with the Heifetz version. There is no chance for hit-and-miss lapses as the soloist rips into the spikier peaks with laser-guided precision maintaining that archetypal Rozsa-esque flow wherein each successive moment evolves, from what came previous, and into the apotheosis that seems inevitable (Levi's conducting too holds tight to the structural contour while allowing that important clash of inner voices its due). Clearly one of Rozsa's most well-regarded concert works, The Violin Concerto is distinguished by that rounded perfection of form that is viscerally thrilling even though the introspection of the Lento cantabile middle section carries one into the kind of almost unspeakably personal contemplation veteran Rozsa listeners often associate with the composer's private works, here played with a languid purity that is exquisite. Very close to the Rozsa ideal of effortless strength and clarity of vision, the Telarc disc also is graced with a muscular version of the Cello Concerto with an equally committed Lyn Harrell, and a concise reading of Theme and Variations for Violin, Cello, and Orchestra with both soloists. Disc rating is *****

Now is your chance to swerve from the glories of the past to the State of the Art in contemporary film score design. Ridley Scott's GLADIATOR is at least a fine visual stimulant to memories of the days when film composers unleashed as bounteously massive and complex treatises on our past as Alex North's masterwork SPARTACUS or Rozsa's own BEN HUR, epic paens to humanity and compassion as telescoped through the simplest needs of heart and soul. Vitality and dramatic control now seem so distant as conceptions that hearing BEN HUR full-on is still a little astonishing with it's wealth of interwoven ideas and symbolic thinking demarcating through mirroring and inversions and structural antitheses the conflict at the core. Rozsa's Roman music with it's blocky meters and vast, hard-edged unfeeling plan of attack is stark affront to the warmer contours of the Judeans, and Rozsa's handling of the difficult interpersonal emotion and motivation is completely fascinating as the themes for Judah and Messala actually merge. That's what composing was about!

GLADIATOR is scored with varied textures by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard. Certain gestures are smooth and vaguely pleasant, as with the LION KING-like vocal-plus-worldbeat textures used as closure to the hour-long album ("Now We Are Free"). Otherwise the score is an impersonal and blank set of contrivances propped up with such blatant references to familiar cliches swimming on top of the usual Zimmerry drones that you can hardly believe a filmmaker of Scott's stature would be this clumsy in his tastes (then you remember the words ALIEN, and LEGEND). Zimmer's abuse of Holst's Mars Bringer of War cross-pollinated with a new refit of the IRON CHEF (i.e, BACKDRAFT) theme in the major set-piece cues ("The Battle", "Barbarian Horde") is so arch you'd think the composer was ridiculing the film. Nothing in the score relates to who the people in the film are, what they are about. Maximus' Sergio Leone, Lost Family & Home Life situation should drive the score's most serious propulsion, but there is only a bit of anonymous BROKEN ARROW twangy guitar and barely melodic PRINCE OF EGYPT-like female vocalese to indicate human involvement, almost as casual ly pleasant a backdrop as someone's aquarium. Upward emotional swings are outlined with variants of CRIMSON TIDE and a few seconds of material reminiscent of Vangelis' 1492: CONQUEST OF PARADISE, and a repeated attempt at Wagner's Siegried Death music (just like in EXCALIBUR). The big heroic licks don't achieve grandeur or power, they just get louder. Every development is scored as its own product-orientation commercial, rendering the whole film as a catalog of clichÈs. Whether this is the result of cynicism or just naivete is beside the point. Future people will remember us (probably fondly) as having soundtracks that forced the expected response rather than risk signaling the individual composer's identity. Disc rating is *

P.S. Go watch your PHANTOM MENACE laserdisc from Japan again (considering it's your favorite movie), and watch your subwoofer go into convulsions and die. The PCM audio version is the most pristine home video mix ever, showcasing the splendiferous details of the score with awesome clarity. Banzai! to John Williams.

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