September 28, 2015

  • Davis Loiters With Chaplin Shorts

    There have been a great number of releases from the Carl Davis Collection that explore the composer’s commitment to providing appropriate scores to classic silent films.  The present release appears to coincide with a new British Film Institute restoration of twelve Charlie Chaplin films made from 1916-1917, often referred to as The Mutuals.  They are collected here from his Carl Davis Collection series.  The title of the CD, Loitering Without Intent, takes its name from one of the sequences.

     

    Davis, having scored several later Chaplin projects, decided to find a way to tackle music for these early shorts.  Taking Chaplin’s own musical approaches that were used in The Gold Rush and City Lights, Davis set forth to encapsulate the various childhood influences that might have been “in the air”, or in Chaplin’s ear, to provide some underscoring that would add musical flavor to these films.  The result here is a series of delightful period pieces, dances (especially in “The Count”, which seems like a gentler Shostakovich score at times) and marches to help punctuate the action, with an occasional “sound effect” added in for good measure.  The orchestra is more a modified theater ensemble of winds, brass and percussion with a string quartet (the Wihan Quartet are on hand to help here).  The sound then can perfectly imply the period quite well.

     

    Sometimes a thematic thread will stay within the couple of selections for a given film.  The thematic material though is overall most attractive with a style that locks in very well to the theatrical approaches of the period.  There are some fine highlights along the way.  The first of these is a wonderful “Valse Amoreuse” and “Fireman’s March” used for The Fireman.  “Loitering Without Intent” and “Duet with a Bedspring” from One A.M. provide some fine woodwind writing and brass color with excellent musical imagery, spring and all.  “The Pawnshop” moves into a bit more subdued Yiddish theater feel in “Fun in the Store” and then shifts into a Baroque-inflected section for “The Combat”.  It is a great example of how music in the period borrowed styles from old and new influences to create musical support.  A fun little “Samba Under Protest!” makes for a nice change of pace in The Rink.  A direct hymn tune quote appears beautifully in “The Conversion” and a little Gilbert and Sullivan and Mozart even appear in “A Policeman’s Lot” both in Easy Street (a few other musical references show up later in The Adventurer).  In The Cure, we get a delightfully-scored two-step.

     

     

    The booklet is filled with fabulous stills from these films with brief descriptions of each of the tracks and information about Davis’ approach to the music.  The performances by members of the City of Prague Philharmonic with the Wihan Quartet are excellent making this a very engaging set of pieces.  This is another of the many fine examples of Davis’ work on older silent films.