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Posted: |
Oct 11, 2015 - 11:59 AM
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By: |
MusicMad
(Member)
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...
12. Richard Addinsell (43)
...
12) Richard Addinsell - I think I only know The Warsaw Concero. That's bloody annoying. Spike Milligan hated it too.
...
Oh no! How can you not like this gorgeous piece? Yes, it's over the top and tries to squeeze a 28' concerto into an 8' rhapsody (or romance?) ... but it's so damn lovely that any musical shortcomings can be forgiven.
I first came across the piece as a 12 ~13 year old when I was left alone with an uncle's record collection and his almost-new Dynatron music centre. I made a cassette tape up of Mantovani recordings (I knew him from his regular TV broadcasts) and Warsaw Concerto was one of the best pieces ... and it's stayed with me for 45 or so years.
I have 6 recordings, my favourite being Ron Goodwin's 1968 take for his album Legend of the Glass Mountain ... then again, RG's versions are usually the best! One of those 6 is the OST recording by pianist Louis Kentner (1941) who apparently wanted his name omitted from the recording details ...
... until he found how popular the piece became and so changed his mind! (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Kentner)
And, of course, Roy Budd used the theme extensively in his score to The Sea Wolves (1980) but these are my least favourite interpretations.
On the subject of Richard Addinsell, my wife chose to play Rumon Gamba/BBC Philharmonic's 2003 suite from The Black Rose (1950) yesterday. Very nice but I failed to identify it or the composer saying it sounded a bit like William Walton in regal style. Not a British film, of course, despite its setting.
From that Chandos album I particularly like the two pieces from his score to Blithe Spirit (1945) ... nice, light and fluffy!
Mitch
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Scores based in pop or jazz idioms, which moved away from silvery strings and overwrought brassy melodrama. The latter just aren't my cup of tea. (Even now, I prefer Cinderella Liberty to Superman, and Witches of Eastwick to Star Wars, for example.)
Tall Guy, do you think that you will ever (as you age) be receptive towards stringy & brassy melodrama? (If for no other reason than it's music that they don't make any more).
Not all composers employed sturm und drang during this pre-'60s time frame.
Composers as different as Alex North and A.F. Lavagnino tended to eschew Germanic Romanticism.
When I listen to FSM's Dragon Seed by Herbert Stothart, I'm impressed by how reserved the music is considering it was from 1944.
If you are able to track down a film scored by Matyas Seiber - watch it - and let us know yours thoughts about it here in this thread. 
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Posted: |
Oct 11, 2015 - 2:07 PM
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By: |
Tall Guy
(Member)
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By the way, I do have a soft spot for Frankel, who used a snippet of Shostakovich's fifth symphony in The Battle of the Bulge. Were you aware of that? As I always say, who knows film music, who only film music knows?
Yes, TG, I remember you mentioning that about Frankel's Battle.
Curious, though, that you like compositions by 20th century symphonists but not so much by those writing orchestral film scores during the '30s through the '50s.
Do you imply that bombast is acceptable as a stand-alone listening experience but not agreeable accompanying onscreen content?
And have I stopped beating my wife?
I can't answer yes or no to your question, because you're pre-supposing that both the concert hall music and the golden age film music are bombastic. If I understand the concept of "bombast" in music correctly, it's something that sounds grand and important but actually isn't. For me that's a very good description of a lot of film music. It's there to illustrate a story, to provide a better understanding of a tale woven by someone to give me a bit of escapism for a couple of hours. The fact that some of us choose to listen to it away from the film is a little perverse. It isn't necessarily "the best film music" that survives this. I've said many times that Goldsmith scores tend to work very well alongside the film, but it's often pained me to listen to them away from it.
Similarly, the music to the new Macbeth works brilliantly with the images, but I'm not sure it would stand the TG test of being played in isolation. Much of this is personal taste, of course, and not everyone would agree with me that Sunshine works equally well with or without the film, for example. So the British film music of the 30s to the 50s is, by and large, bombastic by that definition, and doesn't to my ears work away from the film.
However, when I consider the concert hall music that I cited earlier, the vast majority of it MEANS something, has a life outside the simple spinning of a disc to produce sounds. You imply that you only know the Shostakovich extract in "Battle of the Bulge" because I've mentioned it before. Good memory. But if you were familiar with the 5th symphony, you'd have recognised it for yourself - and not only in "Battle", but in "Princess Mononoke", "Escape to Victory" and "Clear and Present Danger" - just to name three off the top of my head. And the fifth symphony was really significant in the history of the Soviet Union - which means the history of all of us. It was the answer to a charge made by Stalin himself that soviet artists (DDS in the particular) were getting exaggerated ideas of themselves and had lost sight of what the people wanted. Shostakovich's reply was and is endlessly fascinating, and had concert-goers weeping with the significance written into it, especially the third movement, which he then went on to mask with a triumphant but ultimately hollow finale.
His seventh symphony is of even greater significance. Elsewhere in this forum I've made a case for it being the bit of music that won the second world war for the allies. That was a bit of fun, but actually it's not too great a stretch of the imagination to have some truth behind it. Pretty significant, eh? Not bombast at all.
And Sibelius, totem of Finnish nationalism, important in the struggle against invasion. Nielsen, Denmark's greatest composer in all likelihood, not only for the six wonderful symphonies but for hundreds of songs known to Danes from birth. Nothing bombastic there.
I may have chosen a particular view of "bombast" that might not be what you meant by your question. If so, you should make yourself clearer!  However, I hope I've given you a response that you might find to be of some interest.
TG
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Posted: |
Oct 11, 2015 - 3:10 PM
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By: |
MusicMad
(Member)
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By the way, I do have a soft spot for Frankel, who used a snippet of Shostakovich's fifth symphony in The Battle of the Bulge. Were you aware of that? As I always say, who knows film music, who only film music knows?
Yes, TG, I remember you mentioning that about Frankel's Battle.
Curious, though, that you like compositions by 20th century symphonists but not so much by those writing orchestral film scores during the '30s through the '50s.
Do you imply that bombast is acceptable as a stand-alone listening experience but not agreeable accompanying onscreen content?
...
I can't answer yes or no to your question, ...
Now you've done it, Zardoz ... you should know better than to bait TG about DS ... his replies take longer to read than to listen to one of DS's symphonies!
Incidentally, I must play some DS soon. I have three recordings of his 5th symphony and yet haven't played any one of them for nearly two years.
NP: Obsession - Raine/CoPP on BluRay
Mitch
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You imply that you only know the Shostakovich extract in "Battle of the Bulge" because I've mentioned it before. Good memory. But if you were familiar with the 5th symphony, you'd have recognised it for yourself - and not only in "Battle", but in "Princess Mononoke", "Escape to Victory" and "Clear and Present Danger" - just to name three off the top of my head.
I'm not familiar with his 5th, TG. The only Russian composers I like are Alexander Tcherepnin and Vyacheslav Artyomov, and to a lesser extent Reinhold Gliere.
But I wasn't referring specifically to DS, either.
Let me revise my word 'bombast' and replace it with 'crescendo'.
A loud crescendo accompanying sound effects and dialogue in the film would probably be considered 'over the top' by TG whilst a loud crescendo within anyone's symphonies (not just Russian ones) is acceptable to TG.
Is this so?
[hence you liking Cinderella Liberty better than Superman]
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15) James Bernard - Now you're talkin'! But although I think that his scores work tremendously well in the films he wrote them for, they're a little bit simplistic as a stand-alone experience. With notable exceptons of course.
Graham, what do you think of James Bernard's Windom's Way or The Stranglers of Bombay?
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I myself have never heard anything by Nicholas Brodszky. He toiled internationally & even did some work in the U.S.A., but he seems to have concentrated mainly within the U.K. during the 1940s.
Has anybody ever seen A Man About the House, or Tomorrow We Live or Spy for a Day?
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12) Richard Addinsell - I think I only know The Warsaw Concero. That's bloody annoying. Spike Milligan hated it too.
...
Spike also had bad things to say about Herrmann's 'Hangover Square'.
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Posted: |
Oct 13, 2015 - 1:43 AM
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By: |
Graham Watt
(Member)
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You imply that you only know the Shostakovich extract in "Battle of the Bulge" because I've mentioned it before. Good memory. But if you were familiar with the 5th symphony, you'd have recognised it for yourself - and not only in "Battle", but in "Princess Mononoke", "Escape to Victory" and "Clear and Present Danger" - just to name three off the top of my head.
I'm not familiar with his 5th, TG. The only Russian composers I like are Alexander Tcherepnin and Vyacheslav Artyomov, and to a lesser extent Reinhold Gliere.
But I wasn't referring specifically to DS, either.
Let me revise my word 'bombast' and replace it with 'crescendo'.
A loud crescendo accompanying sound effects and dialogue in the film would probably be considered 'over the top' by TG whilst a loud crescendo within anyone's symphonies (not just Russian ones) is acceptable to TG.
Is this so?
[hence you liking Cinderella Liberty better than Superman]
"Mr TG, your silence on this matter leaves the court with no choice but to surmise that you still beat your wife. Now, for the last time, have you nothing to say?"
-------------
"Very well. This court finds the accused guilty as charged. You will be guillotined at dawn."
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