The moguls of Golden Age Hollywood were sometimes crass, yet they also had high cultural aspirations, and nothing said class more loudly than classical music. Little wonder that all the studios had staff composers and conductors and in-house orchestras to provide scores for the movies. In the 1970s, as part of the overall revival of interest in classic Hollywood that led to scores of critical appreciations and eventually flowered into Turner Classic Movies, conductor Charles Gerhardt began recording pre-1960 film music with the National Philharmonic Orchestra and releasing the results as a series of LPs called Classic Film Scores. The latest batch of CD reissues on RCA Red Seal has just become available.
A good place to start is Citizen Kane: The Classic Film Scores of Bernard Hermann. The composer would enjoy a long career, eventually working with Hitchcock (North by Northwest) and Scorsese (Taxi Driver). The most familiar music on the CD will be the four pieces he composed for the Orson Welles classic, but the disc also includes selections from less remembered movies, including the film noir On Dangerous Ground (1951) and the gothic period drama Hangover Square (1945).
Hermann was a Juilliard student who found his way into the CBS radio orchestra, where he met Welles. In those years the media was alive with the sound of classical music; in fact, radio and movies proved a more receptive venue for modernism than the concert hall. Franz Waxman, represented by Sunset Boulevard: The Classic Scores, was likewise a music studentin Germany. His side job in Berlin jazz bands led to work in early German sound films; he conducted the score for Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. Along with music for Sunset Boulevard, the selections recorded by Gerhardt include such beloved films as The Philadelphia Story, The Bride of Frankenstein and Rebecca.
The Hungarian Miklos Rozsa was an ambitious young expatriate who realized a composer might starve if he couldn't find work in the movies. His classical training was put to good use after he made his way to Hollywood. Spellbound: The Classic Film Scores of Miklos Rozsa includes the Dream Sequence from the Hitchcock picture; generous selections from The Red House (1947) show an affinity with the rich orchestra colors of Bela Bartok. Rozsa's ear for turbulent opulence proved idea in 1940s Hollywood, where emotions were pitched at a level just higher than life.
Three other discs of Gerhardt conducted music have been released on CD, Classic Film Scores for Bette Davis, Now, Voyager: The Classic Film Scores of Max Steiner and Elizabeth and Essex: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. In addition, David Raskin Conducts Great Film Scores features the composer with baton in hand. He is best known for the teasingly mysterious theme for Laura. In the jacket notes he recalls how tyrant director Otto Preminger forced him on Friday to deliver the music by first thing Monday. The moral of that story is that the creative exertion of pressure deadlines can result in great things.
