January 16, 2014

  • Fabulous New RPO Film Music Compilation

    Conductor David Firman leads this new Royal Philharmonic compilation from their Here Come the Classics series.  Firman has a long history of work in film music going back to the 1990s where he served as a keyboardists on scores such as Basic Instinct, Total Recall, Return of the Jedi and Batman.  For the present release, he has chosen a very interesting and diverse collection of great film music suites along with some lighter tuneful material.

     

    Fans of Charles Gerhardt’s film music classics will recognize several of the suites included here.  Firman uses the same arrangements for Key Largo, The Lost Weekend, Wuthering Heights, and Captains Courageous.  The performances here are equally stellar with “Cathy’s Theme” being a wonderful presentation avoiding some of the cloying sweetness of some performances.  One really feels that Firman is moving through these suites not as a series of disconnected sequences, but as a more unified whole that makes transitions between different moments work very well here.  These more intense suites are balanced with film versions of lighter fare like Jarre’s “Rosy’s Theme” and “Adela’s Theme” from Ryan’s Daughter and A Passage to India respectively as well as Hadjidakas’ classic “Never On a Sunday.”  Roland Shaw’s arrangement of the latter keeps it from being a pops number entirely.  Victor Young’s “Call of the Faraway Hills” is perhaps the only “light” pops sounding track.

     

    The really big surprises that come on this disc is a new recording of music from Rear Window.  This is Christopher Palmer’s five-movement suite that once was available on an old San Diego Pops release conducted by Lalo Schifrin.  The suite receives a fabulous performance here whose jazzier moments have an earlier balance in the selections from Bernstein’s Walk on the Wild Side.  The other “premiere” to disc is a six-movement “suite” from Goldsmith’s Chinatown.  (No arranger is given so this may be a published version by the composer.)  The suite is a series of shorter cues bookended by the main and end titles music.  The piece gives a great flavor for this score in about 8 minutes.  The performances are again superb.

     

    It is somewhat hard to follow what the “theme” of the disc is as there seems to be a blend of Western music with some film noir-like scoring moments and a few popular tunes.  But, that aside, this is one of the best orchestral film compilations to come along in quite a while and is easily the best film music release from the RPO.  Film music recordings that focus on the music as music and not pops fodder are rare and this is one of those times when things come together very well.  One side note is that the recording level is a bit lower which is not a problem for average stereo systems but might make it less of a drive CD (as it has a more classical recording approach).