Most likely your wallet is as tired as mine if you love classic film music because September was filled with one great surprise after another.  In fact two of my personal favorites from this month are already out of print, and one is likely to follow soon.

First up is the massive multi-disc MGM Soundtrack Treasury from Film Score Monthly.  I struggled hard with this one but the combination of 1960s music and the variety of unusual fare from great composers made this one a final buy for me.  Part of the interest lay in my John Williams completion mode since he was the pianist for The Apartment a wonderful little score which starts off a series of great discs in the first 6 discs of the set.  I have to say that I like the Hefti disc the most here along with the aforementioned score.  And I found that personal taste tended to favor the first few discs of each separate container.  Still, there is a lot of good music to hear and it will be something I know I'll return to again. 

Next up was Boy on a Dolphin another of Friedhofer's Oscar-nominated scores.  This gorgeous stereo remastering is really a great listen as well.  Intrada had to limit purchases to one disc as this soon sold out!  I can't imagine a Friedhofer disc selling out so fast, but it is a mark of how many are beginning to discover his music and appreciate the rarity of its availability on CD.  It is a standard and firm piece of 1950s scoring.

Intrada's last set of surprises included The Boys From Brazil which I wrote about the other day.  Still humming away to that great waltz theme after a few days of listening to this wonderful Goldsmith score. 

Earlier this month I commented here on the completion of Vanska's Beethoven Cycle on BIS.  The last disc featured the 2nd and 7th symphonies, two works that make for a fine pairing.  This whole cycle is well worth your attention (and it will no doubt come soon in a boxed set I would guess) as a premier set of performances that should end up on the top five Beethoven cycles, and the first great one of the new millenium.

I am also eternally greatful to the work of Bill Stromberg and John Morgan for their restorations and as a Herrmann fan, their release of The Kentuckian/Williamsburg:Story of a Patriot is just another great recording in a stellar series from their Tribute Film Classics label.  I don't know what Naxos was thinking when they gave up on this project, but they have lost out.  There are some great Steiner and Korngold releases coming that should continue to make these releases historically memorable taken as a whole. 

So, there you have it, from Beethoven to Goldsmith, a lot of interesting, varied music worth checking out.  You can at least hear clips of the MGM library release on-line to savor the music, if in truncated form.  We haven't even gotten to Oscar bait season yet, nor the new Indiana Jones set! 

From one set of great recordings to another and from opposite ends of the musical spectrum, it is time to encourage you to add this latest Herrmann release to your must hear list.  The other day, looking through a list of Herrmann scores released on CD over the past decade, it was amazing to see that most of the composer’s music had made it to the medium in one way or another.  Sure some of the scores are represented by an excerpt here or there, rarely collected together, but many are, amazingly, original soundtrack releases.  Herrmann’s sound is definitely unique as we can hear in these original soundtrack samples, but when his music gets re-recorded we have been just as lucky.  The team at Tribute Film Classics, after some truly fabulous releases already in 2008, has put together two of Herrmann’s Americana scores for this release in complete recordings.  It gives us a window in to the non-Hitchcock late 1950s narrative style Herrmann was writing then as well as a look at a type of score that avoids the fantastical.  More importantly, it gives us a chance to hear some of the amazing instrumental colors in vivid sound.

The Kentuckian (1955) was the only film directed by Burt Lancaster who also stars as a frontiersman in 1820s America.  In some respects, Herrmann’s music for this film often sounds as a sort of Vaughan Williams folksong approach coupled with the sort of amazing orchestral colors we have come to expect from Herrmann.  Those delightful horn lines, sounding much like another 1955 score, The Trouble With Harry (of which this is a great companion), turn up often here in signature Herrmann sound.  The primary difference here is in the longer lyric lines that we first hear in the gorgeous “Daydreaming” early on in the score.  These thematic threads float around a texture reminiscent of Delius’ Americana pieces but here cast in a more contemporary harmony for the period.  These longer melodic contours lie in marked contrast to interesting dark woodwind colors that often slide under a doleful clarinet.  What is also amazing is how much Herrmann communicates with just a few instrumental lines, often holding back with the full orchestra for brief punctuations.  “The Steamboat” is a particular highlight with its jazz-like rhythmic syncopations that runs from a sort of hoe down in full orchestral guise.  Though the cues are generally relatively brief, the presentation feels like a large-scale tone poem.    

The recording here is fascinatingly detailed allowing you to experience the real richness of these darker sonorities placed against the lighter oboe line, or mixed with strings.  Somehow, rather than creating a “concert” sound, the recording has the feel of a 1950s film music sound (though balancing between being too dry or over ambient) but recorded in stunning sound.  This is a real gem of a score that hints at folk song melodies cast in often gentle orchestration that moves into darker territory effortlessly with classic Herrmann tension-building moments.  If this was the only pieces of music on this CD it would be highly recommendable, but there is more to hear!

The other score here is a bit of an oddity.  Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot was created to be used at Colonial Williamsburg where it holds the distinction of one of the longest-running motion pictures since it first premiered in 1957.  You can still catch the film there today.  It becomes an interesting essay in using borrowed music, here the oft-quoted “Chester” by William Billings ( a popular tune for American composers in this period).  In Herrmann’s hands it sounds like one of our most beautiful melodies as it is used for a variety of presentations cast in a semi-Baroque orchestral style complete with rhetorical musical devices from the 18^th century.  It is a real beautiful orchestral piece on its own merit that matches some of the composer’s interest in period music with the sort of updated sound favored by English composers of the 1940s and 1950s, especially in the string writing.  Along the way a few familiar tunes make the trip worth the time, especially the variations on “Yankee Doodle” in “Taxes.”  This becomes one of the more interesting American suites to match others composed for the concert hall at the time and its inclusion here is a welcome opportunity to hear this side of Herrmann’s music in all its elegance combined with wonderful wit. 

The accompanying booklet, cast in earthy tones, features an overview of Herrmann by Steven C. Smith and an exhaustive cue-by-cue analysis of both scores by Kevin Scott.  Yet another of the many great releases from this team that continues to make some of the best orchestral recordings today.  Steiner and Korngold releases are on the horizon and should no doubt continue to please music fans.  This continues the superb series of recordings.