UNCHAINED MELODY, The Film Themes of ALEX NORTH (BCD 3010)

The author of DEATH OF A SALESMAN presented a copy of his play to the man who scored both the stage and screen versions:

To Alex North - and all his blessed flutes and clarinets that turned our Willy's dreams into music.

It is, of course, the job of the film composer to help turn dreams into music. His function is to add dimensions that cannot quite be conveyed by words or acting or projected images. It is the least complex, collaborative art of film and it is only in the calibre of a composer like Alex North that its potential is ever realized. A clue to this ability to communicate on an almost extra-sensory level can be found in North's admission, "I find it practically impossible to score anything that does not move me emotionally." It is an admission that reveals the nature of the man - a man of sensitivity and compassion as well as extraordinary musicianship. Those who know this best are his fellow composers. The highly successful Jerry Goldsmith states the case simply, "Alex is a perfectionist. Of all of us, he's the master.

It may seem somewhat strange at this point in time to speak of the difficulty serious American composers had in establishing a foothold in Hollywood. But the fact is that the basic concepts in the formative years of film scoring in America were European. Many of the pioneering composers were either born abroad or educated abroad, and much of the musical thinking in Hollywood grew from the use of Nineteenth century classical material in the early days of the industry. It was not until 1940, for example, that Aaron Copland appeared in Hollywood to score OUR TOWN, and such was its lean, intrinsically American flavor that it was almost out of line with the then prevailing styles. Despite Copland's prestige and influence he was never able to draw more than the occasional assignment in film scoring. It was another decade or so before the young composers who grew up admiring Copland and the other major American composers were able to employ their influences in Hollywood. The use of jazz colors in serious scoring did not register until 1951, when Alex North made his enormous breakthrough with A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. It was a major turning point in American film composition.

North came to film scoring with a great deal of experience in many areas of composition. A graduate of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, he afterwards attended the Juilliard School of Music in New York on a scholarship, while making a living as a Western Union telegraph operator, followed by a two-year period of musical study in Russia. On returning to America, North was able to spend time with both Aaron Copland and Ernst Toch in New York and with Silvestre Revueltas in Mexico City. During the second World War he served with the Army and was put in charge of therapeutic self-entertainment programmes in the hospitals, concluding his enlistment with the rank of captain. His first experience with film came with commissions to score a number of documentaries for various branches of the government. North was particularly interested in writing for the ballet theatre and his success in this regard widened to include composing incidental scores for stage plays. His association with director Elia Kazan on Broadway resulted in him being brought to Hollywood when Kazan did the film version of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. By this time in his career North had also written a formidable list of orchestral and chamber works.

This album represents North in his first seven years in Hollywood. Hopefully, following albums will trace his contributions from 1958 to the present. STREETCAR is represented by his poignant theme for the wistful and pathetic Blanche, with its reference to the old dance tune "Varsouviana", echoing in her memory. The album begins with North's most popular melody, the theme from the film UNCHAINED (1955), an otherwise minor picture about life on a California prison farm. THE RACERS, made the same year, starred Kirk Douglas and Bella Darvi as lovers in the frenetic world of sports car champions. The theme here recorded recalls one of the more tender moments. One of the most highly regarded of North's scores in VIVA ZAPATA! (1952), starring Marlon Brando as the heroic Mexican revolutionary. The love of his life was a girl named Josefa, played by Jean Peters, and North's theme eloquently suggests that love. THE BAD SEED (1956) was a searing account of a murderous eight-year-old girl, the kind only a mother could love, and North's "Lullaby" speaks for that aspect of the shocking tale. Paddy Chayeksky's THE BACHELOR PARTY (1957) told of the anguish of single life among a group of middle-aged men and their reactions as one of them (Don Murray) approaches marriage. The score is yet another example of this composer's ability to describe what cannot be said with words alone.

THE THIRTEENTH LETTER (1951) was filmed in a town in Quebec and told of a community thrown into fear and suspicion by the antics of a writer of poison pen letters. Among those threatened is the lovely young Denise (Linda Darnell), here characterized by North. Another of his musical sketches of attractive girls is that of Eve (Susan Strasberg) in STAGE STRUCK (1959), an amusing version of back-stage life in the New York theatres. For a vastly different show business story, I'LL CRY TOMORROW (1956), North underscored the fall and regeneration of the alcoholic actress Lillian Roth (Susan Hayward) and helped convey the sadness and the courage in her life.

The final three themes in the album are those for bolder and more flamboyant pictures. North scored the 1952 re-make of LES MISERABLES, starring Michael Rennie as Jean Valjean. The theme here recorded underlines the love of Valjean's daughter (Debra Paget) for the spirited young student Marius (Cameron Mitchell). In THE ROSE TATTOO (1955), an excellent film version of Tennessee Williams' play, the fiery Anna Magnani played a fiery Italian widow, scornful of men until thawed out by an ebullient truck driver (Burt Lancaster). North's "Bacio" relates to the thawing out process. And finally the love theme from DESIREE (1954), a grandly romantic account of young Napoleon Bonaparte (Marlon Brando) and his love for the beautiful Desiree Clary (Jean Simmons). The film was conventional - the score was not. The film music of Alex North is original and subtle and distinct. He has hew peers.

THE THREE MUSKETEERS (BCD 3013)

"Three Musketeers" (1974) brought together a singularly talented group of actors and filmmakers. It was the first major international success for producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind, who would later make the "Superman" films; it marked the screenwriting debut of George MacDonald Fraser, whose ribald "Flashman" novels were then popular; and it heralded the return, after five year absence, of director Richard Lester, whose manic style was a key factor in the success of the early Beatles films "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" and whose later, more serious films such as "Petulia" were critical favorites but box office failures.

For their adaptation of Alexandre Dumas' 1844 novel of swashbackling adventure, the Salkinds lined up an impressive roster of talent, all perfectly cast: Oliver Reed as Athos, Richard Chamberlain as Aramis and Frank Finlay as Porthos, the Musketeers of the title; Michael York as the aspiring Musketeer D'Artagnan; Charlton Heston as the scheming Cardinal Richelieu, Christopher Lee as his aide de-camp Rochefort and Faye Dunaway as the seductress Milady; Jean-Pierre Casnel as King Louis XIII, Geraldine Chaplin as his queen Anne of Austria and Simon Ward as her lover, England's Duke of Buckingham; and Raquel Welch as Costance, the queen's dressmaker and confidante.

Fraser's script remained faithful to Dumas. In France, 1625, young D'Artagnan sets off to join the King's Musketeers and befriends Athos, Aramis and Portbos, whom he enlists in a plan to save the Queen form Richelieu's latest plot. Aware that Anne has made a gift of 12 diamond studs to the Duke, Richelieu directs Rochefort and Milady to steal two of them as proof of her infidelity to the King. D'Artagnan races from Paris to London and back in a desperate attempt to uphold the queen's honor---and impress his new love, Constence.

"The Three Musketeers" added a comic sensibility to Dumas' classic story of political intrigue, scandalous romance and high adventure. And, as they would on "Robin and Marjan" (1976), director Lester and cinematographer David Watkin further cariched the film by contrasting the squalid living conditions of the commonfolk with the opulent lifestyles of the aristocracy. The decision to release as two films ("The Three Musketeers" followed in 1975) what was conceived and shot as a single movie led the actors to sue the Salkinds for extra wages (and generated great publicity for the sequel), but "The Three Musketeers" remains a highly entertaining film in its own right.

French composer Michel Legrand was one of the hottest names in film music when he was signed to score "The Three Musketeers". He won the 1971 original score Oscar for "Summer of '42" and had previously copped a best song Oscar for "The Windmills of Your Mind", from the 1968 "The Thomas Crown Affair". He had Grammys for composing "Summer of '42" and the 1971 TV-movie "Brian's Song". And his songs from 1964's "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" ("I Will Wait for You"), 1969's "The Happy Ending" ("What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life") and 1970's "Princess of Dreams" (the title tune) were Oscar nominated hits.

Legrand's well-known penchant for jazz and wildly romantic melodies made him an unusual choice for a film that demanded a distinct period flavor. His classically styled, duo piano score for the 1971 "The Go Between" and his gypsy violin music for the 1973 TV-movie "The Adventures of Don Quixote" being rare previous examples. But he proved equal to the challenge, creating post Renaissance fanfares and lavish orchestral treatments for the films elaborately siagral adventures. The original recording of this music, in fact, was nominated for a 1974 Grammy as Best Original Score for a Motion Picture or Television Special.

Since that time, Legrand has won a third Oscar, for the original song score of "Yentl" (1983); and two more Grammys, for his original jazz composition "Images", written for alto saxophonist Phil Woods in 1975, and the album that contained it. He also scored the acclaimed "Atlantic city" (1981) and received an Emmy nomination for the miniseries "A Woman Called Golda" (1982). And he has worked on projects involving both Fraser and Lester, with mixed results: Lester discarded his daring score for "Robin and Marian", written in the form of a double concerto for violin, cello and string orchestra; and Fraser wrote the script for Richard Chamberlain's 1987 TV-movie "Casanova", for which Legrand created another delightful period score.

Legrand also directed his first film, the autobiographical "five Days in June," in 1989.

Legrand's music for "The Three Musketeers" highlights the pageantry of the period and the hijinks of the adventuresome quartet. The main title---heard under stylized, slow motion shots of the young D'Artagnan learning swordsmanship from his father---sets in stage with a pounding brass and percussiondominated fanfare, punctuated by period instruments playing a colorful secondary theme.

The composer's two love themes are among his most exquisite. "To love a Queen", scored for strings alone, in a poignant accompaniment for the clandestine meeting of Queen Anne and the Duke of Buckingham; "All's Fair in Love and Feet", a charming piece fro recorders and strings, reflects D'Artagnan's passion for Constance. Grand orchestral flourishes introduce Richelieu ("He Ain't Heavy, He's the Cardinal") and the Duke in England ("Bustling Buckingham").

"Sword for Your Supper" is a lighthearted scherzo for the foursome roughhousing their way to a free dinner, while "Four Abreast" (which opera lovers will recognize as inspired by a motif in act II of Verdi's "Aida") underscores their journey to London to retrieve the missing diamonds from Buckingham. D'Artagnan and his companions battle the Cardinal's swordsmen to the tune of the Musketeers' theme and variations in "Dirty Business Amongst the Dirty Laundry" and "Foiled Again".

Legrand cleverly emulates the Baroque style in three pieces of source music: "Don't Put Milady on the Stage", heard during an exchange between Milady and rochefort; "Hawks Versus doves", as the king announces his plans for a ball to the Queen; and "A Round and Around", an appropriately titled canon for Anne's merry-go-round ride and the King's elaborate lawn chess game.

The pomp surrounding D'Artagnan's appointment as a Musketeer--and the built-in trailer for the sequel, "The Four Musketeers"--builds to a triumphant finale in "Three's Company, but Four Will Cost You Extra". And the Musketeers's theme is reprised for the end titles.

CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT (BCD 3017)

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What Music they make!” Ever since Bela Lugosi phonetically intoned that line in Tod Browning's Dracula (1930), music and the children of the night have been inextricably entwined. In the original Dracula it was oddly enough Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake that served as a main title theme; and for generations of filmgoers since, now watching on television and videotape, hearing the opening strains of Tchaikovsky's elegaic ballet conjures up images not of dancers floating like swans but of tuxedoed Hungarians with slicked-back hair passing through cobweb-covered Gothic arches. The music has progressed, of course, from the needle-drop approach of the early talkies to the portentous “Viennese” underscores by Hans Salter and Heinz Roemheld in later Hollywood productions, the frenzied horns and strings from James Bernard for most of the Hammer Draculas, the brilliant, neo-Classic phrasings of John Williams' score to John Badham's Dracula (1979), all the way to Popul Vuh's synthesized rumblings, screeches, and exploding chords in Werner Herzog's remake of Nosferatu (1979).

It was F.W. Murnau in his original Nosferatu (1922) who made the first feature-length version of Bram Stoker's novel. (The music for that picture, being pre-synchronized sound, was and is the choice of the individual accompanists. Like Tod Browning, many organists today favor Wagner and Tchaikovsky. Ironically, Murnau's full title for his silent film was Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens, “A Symphony of Horrors.”) Murnau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen appended Stoker's concept with several elements of their own invention for Nosferatu that became part of vampire lore, most significantly the destruction of the vampire by the rays of the sun. His bald-headed, sunken-eyed, frock-coated bloodsucker, Orlof, played by the pseudonymous Max Schreck (which means “scream” in German) had a much harder time than Bela Lugosi passing for normal, even in the 19th Century context of the film. Murnau's visualization, startlingly original for its time, continues to influence filmmakers to this day. When Karen passes her claw-tipped hand under the barricaded door and scratches at the floor to mesmerize the priest, Frank, in Fangoria's Children of the Night, the ultimate antecedent for that image is Nosferatu. Zakir, the amphibious, crypt-dwelling vampire of Children of the Night doesn't wear a tux and prefers the natural look for his shoulder-length hair. He has the most protruding cheekbones since Jack Palance did a TV Count Dracula for Dan Curtis in 1974 and a complexion best described a leprous. In his sheer beastliness, he also harkens back to the spectral Count Orlof.

Daniel Licht's underscore for Children of the Night draws from the full range of traditions associated with the horror genre and the vampire film in particular. He begins, for the “Main Title,” with a foreboding, brusquely melodic theme. Playing under black-and-white titles, a three-note motif repeated in the middle and lower registers adds a driving, monochromatic undertone. Since the film itself contains many elements of parody, starting with the very name of the middle-American town in which vampirism will rear its undead head, Allsburg, the music changes to a lighter tone. The opening scenes are darkly comic: a converted van topped with loudspeakers and a cross fringed with Christmas-tree lights cruises for souls rather than bodies down the main street. The widescreen frame pivots back and forth while a small-town doctor and small-town ambulance-chaser argue over a dead patient/live client to the discomfort of the mayor. Finally, the van knocks over the town drunk, Matty, (played by Garret Morris) as he crosses the street causing him to cry over his spilled wine (a red omen of blood to come?). The tone carries over into the music with the “Girl's Theme,” a pastiche of “Tammy” tunes with a little “Gidget” thrown in for good measure. While the movie meanders about and the comic moments become grislier, from Grandma dropping her dentures before she tries to put the bite on the young hero, Mark, to the drainspout arranged to funnel blood into a punchbowl, the music maintains a through-line. The Girls go to Church and Mark meets Karen are traditional cues for straight horror scenes where Zakir is reanimated and Father Frank shows Mark through a peephole what modern vampire methods are like. But by the time Mark drives up to Allsburg with a couple of bags of stakes in his back seat to find Lucy (hommage to the Dracula novel and “Lucy Westenra”?), the tone of film and underscore have shifted again.

With “Blooduscker's Ball,” comic and horrific are fully intermixed. Earlier, darker themes are woven into a dance cadence. In “Cocoon Love,” when Lucy stumbles onto two amourous vampires coupling underneath a “cocoon” excreted from their mouths which looks like a layer of buggle gum (yuck!), Licht's music emphasizes both the mechanical with metallic notes and the exotic with a hollow percussion resembling log drums and adds reverb to harmonize the source sound effects, the preternatural groans and moans from within the cocoon. As the movie shifts into final gear, while Matty, who has commandeered the preacher van helps Mark and Lucy elude the pursuing vampires-cum-townspeople and Zakir smells out Lucy's virgin blood, Karen's daughter, Cindy, stakes her cocooned mom to undead oblivio and then gets Lucy to help her free Zakir's flock of crypt kids (that's enough, you get the idea), the underscore again provides a through-line balancing between terror and titters.

Licht's “End Credits” cue wryly reaffirms all that has gone before. As Allsburg goes back to what it calls normal (“I got half the town lined up over at my clinic,” the de-fanged doctor laments to the mayor, “Been pulling splinters out of their chests all day long!”), a craning shot moves up through the branches of a foreground tree to follow the young couple, Mark and Lucy, as they walk off down the main street hand-in-hand, and three musical themes are recapitulated. First, as tranquility is restored, an andante Allsburg theme is restated with a piano lead, measured with same, plaintive hesitation as Elmer Bernstein's small-town archetype, To Kill A Mockingbird. Then with a synthesized crash, the log drums of “Cocoon Love” return (Zakir goes Hawaiian?). Finally, a marching band strides out aurally dressed in liederhosen accompanied by indistinguishable verbal asides, as if from overlapping frequencies of a badly-tuned radio, and in the end an electronic telegraph key (!?).

About the Composer

Daniel Licht studied composition at Hampshire College in Amhearst, Massachusetts. He scored his first feature, Atrapodos, with director Matthew Patrick, a fellow student, while still in school and immediately after graduating. While continuing to study composition and orchestration privately with Tommy Goodman in New York, Licht began to underscore professionally and produced music for commercials, television pieces, and feature films. in 1989, he moved to Los Angeles to devote himself exclusively to film scoring.

ELIZABETH AND ESSEX (BCD 3026)

ELIZABETH, ESSEX, and KORNGOLD

Erich Korngold's success scoring films had much to do with his talents as a composer of operas. In point of fact he was working on his fifth and final opera, Die Kathrin, at the time he was writing his first film score, Captain Blood (1935). His approach to scoring was operatic. He regarded film scripts as libretti and he said the texture of the dialogue and the pitch of the actors' voices influenced what he wrote. Given the flamboyant nature of many of his assignments it must have been difficult for him to restrain himself operatically. Sometimes he did not, as in the case of the freed galley slaves bursting into song in The Sea Hawk (1940) and the choral ending of Kings Row (1942). He always referred to his film scores as "my little operas without singing."

By the terms of his contract with Warner Brothers--he was the first composer of international stature to sign with a Hollywood studio--Korngold was required to write only three scores every two years. He also had the luxury of choice and could not be assigned to a film against his wishes. In the case of The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex Korngold made known his interest the moment the film was put into production. This he saw as an ideal "opera without singing." Later he said that of all his scores this was the one that could most easily have been developed into an opera.

Korngold's music for Elizabeth and Essex is a more contained work than his other scores. The reason is that the film itself is an almost literal treatment of Maxwell Anderson's 1930 play, "Elizabeth the Queen," with its two primary characters and its limited scenic range. It gave Korngold even more reason to think operatically in scoring what was virtually a theatre piece. It is almost as if the score has an invisible proscenium arch over it.

Anderson's play, which starred Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt when first presented in New York, was not intended to be historically accurate. It is a romantic fantasy and treats its subjects with the same poetic license that Peter Shaffer employed with Mozart in Amadeus. It is unlikely that Queen Elizabeth and Robert Devereaux, the Earl of Essex, were actually lovers as depicted by Anderson. Essex was certainly a favorite and dallied with the Queen's affections but he was thirty-four when beheaded in 1601 and she was sixty-eight, two years short of her death. Also, the play is almost as much about court intrigue as about love, although it is the poignancy of doomed romance that Korngold stresses in his score.

Released in November of 1939, the film was given splendid production values, with rich Technicolor photography, gorgeous sets and costumes and an array of fine character actors. Warners had purchased the play as a vehicle for Bette Davis, and since Errol Flynn was their top male star the role of Essex was his whether he wanted it or not. He did not particularly want it. Never a secure actor, Flynn was thoroughly intimidated by Davis, who had made it known she wanted Laurence Olivier, then a name of little value in America. Flynn demanded that the title of the play be changed to at least acknowledge his presence in it. At one point The Knight and the Lady was considered but Davis rejected it. She was, after all, playing Queen Elizabeth! As Flynn rightly suspected the critics heaped praise on Davis but not on him. However, many years later Davis herself allowed that Flynn's playing of the headstrong, vainglorious Essex was better than she had thought at the time.

In scoring Elizabeth and Essex Korngold - and it is interesting that almost half of his sixteen film scores deal with historical material - decided not to use any actual source material or approximate ancient musical sounds. He said, "The loves and hates of the two main characters, the ideas expressed by the playwright generally, while taken from history, are symbolical. It is a play of eternally true principles and motives of love and ambition, as recurrent today as three hundred years ago. The characters speak the English spoken today. Why then should the composer use `thou' and `thee' and `thine' if the dialogue doesn't?"

Elizabeth and Essex is a film in which the music score plays a vivid and vital part. Fully an hour of the film's running time of one hundred and forty-six minutes is supported by music. The orchestration is unusually complex and detailed. Aside from the normal symphonic complement of strings, woodwinds, brass and percussion the score calls for three saxophones, two harps, a piano, a spinet, an organ, a vibraphone, and an harmonium. In view of the supplementary and fragmentary nature of this form of composition very few film scores merit recording in their entirety. Elizabeth and Essex is an exception. Every cue except one is presented in chronological order in this recording by Carl Davis and the Munich Symphony Orchestra. Missing is the song "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," which in the film is abruptly interrupted when the Queen in anger smashes the mirror into which she is looking. However, the melody of the song is heard played on the spinet prior to the smashing, thereby making sense when Korngold later alludes to it in variations.

In recording the complete score we found that it made musical sense to divide it into six suites:

Suite One - Elizabeth and Essex

Following the heraldic title music the film opens with Essex's victory over the Spaniards at Cadiz, causing him to be greeted as a hero in the streets of London, but despised by ministers envious of his access to the Queen. When he appears before her in court she shames him, pointing out that the Spaniards sank their treasure ships rather than let them fall into his hands. The Crown needs money, not empty glory. His humiliation is deepened when she promotes Sir Walter Raleigh (Vincent Price) to high office, making him Essex's superior. The two men are rivals for power, and Essex storms out of the court to sulk at his country home in Wanstead. Later in private the Queen gazes at a painting of Essex and ponders her love for this handsome but politically unwise young man.

Suite Two - The Queen

A military courier speeds to London to inform the Queen of defeat in Ireland. In the palace the Queen plays chess with her chief lady-in- waiting Lady Penelope (Olivia de Havilland), whom she knows is in love with Essex. To amuse the Queen, Penelope and Lady Margaret (Nanette Fabray) sing to her, but the song taunts about young love and the Queen angrily dismisses Penelope. She comforts the weeping Margaret, who misses her lover who is serving in Ireland. The courier arrives with his news of disaster. Among those killed is Margaret's lover. The Queen commiserates, "Poor child."

Suite Three - Reconciliation

At Wanstead Essex is joined in hawk hunting by his friend Francis Bacon (Donald Crisp), who advises him to return to London to stop the Queen being misled by Raleigh and the other ambitious courtiers. Raleigh, who has bedecked himself in silver armor to impress the Queen finds that Essex has capriciously outfitted her entire guard in similar fashion. Lady Penelope tells Essex it would be safer if he loved her and not the Queen, but the rash Essex needs no advice. He and the Queen reconcile and attempt to be understanding lovers but she knows what he really wants is to be king and to rule with her in equal rank, terms that are impossible. She warns him that her court is rife with intrigue and that there are those who will do anything for power.

Suite Four - Ireland

Despite her warnings, Essex is easily challenged to take command of the Irish campaign, which her ministers know will be his downfall. She gives him a ring, telling him that he must send it to her whenever he needs help. In Ireland his failure to halt the rebels is made the more miserable by the apparent refusal of the Queen to answer his letters. At the palace the plotters intercept the letters, with Lady Penelope tricked into the conspiracy. The Queen weeps in despair. Outfought in Ireland Essex agrees to a truce with the Irish leader, Tyrone (Alan Hale) and realizes he has no choice but to submit.

Suite Five - Essex Returns

Essex returns to London, not in defeat but as the leader of an army prepared to overthrow the Crown. The Queen holds court and ignores the advice of her ministers to command her forces to repel Essex. She allows Essex entry into the throne room and when he assures her he will not usurp her she dismisses her entourage. In private they confess their love but when it becomes apparent he still wants to be king and rule as an equal she orders his arrest. The good of the country must come before any personal considerations.

Suite Six - The Tower of London

Essex is sentenced to death and confined to the Tower of London. Penelope begs for his life and confesses her part in the conspiracy, and is forgiven. The chief plotter, Sir Robert Cecil (Henry Daniell) advises the Queen to disperse the crowds who are crying in support of Essex but she ignores his fears. Instead she orders him to bring Essex to her. The Queen wonders why he never sent the ring and he explains that he could not use it to gain the power he seeks. Realizing that he would be a disastrous monarch she knows he must go to his death. For the last time they speak of the lovers they might have been under different circumstances.

About the Conductor

Carl Davis is a musician in the American tradition. He composes, he conducts. He is associated with everything from Beethoven to Broadway. Born in New York, Carl began his studies with Paul Nordoff, Hugo Kauder and Per Nirgaard. In 1958 he was assistant conductor with the Shaw Chorale. In 1959 his review Diversions co-written with Stephen Vinaver won him an off-Broadway Emmy. When the show was presented at the 1961 Edinburgh Festival, with a subsequent transfer to London, he was invited to write for the television show That Was the Week that Was. Other commissions followed and Carl decided to settle in England.

His many film and television credits include Hollywood, The Snow Goose, The Naked Civil Servant, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Rainbow, Scandal, and Frankenstein Unbound.

Carl Davis has also made a tremendous contribution to modern appreciation of silent films. With the support of the Thames restoration team, Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, he has composed new scores for numerous silent classics, among them Ben-Hur, Intolerance, and The Big Parade. Recently Carl completed a recording of Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio and for 1992 is composing a full-length ballet, A Christmas Carol, from the Dickens novel.

A Personal Note

While preparing for this recording I realized that one of the great challenges was going to be our ability to replicate, as much as possible, Korngold's original score in chronological order, with all of its dash and nuance and sweeping emotion, keeping intact his exact intentions and timings - all without the usual visual aid of conducting the score to picture. What one needs is the incentive, the impetus, the sheer drive of the movie itself to help carry the music forward, to make it conform, to create the vital push that gives a great score its vibrancy and allows it to live in the moment.

I watched Elizabeth and Essex many times at home on video cassette, but that did not seem to be enough! So I took the movie with me, plugged in the VCR at the Munich Hilton, and set about watching it again and again. Each night I cued up the scenes for the next day's recording, tried to commit them to memory, and the following day in my mind tried to "see" them again in all their Technicolor glory, and then attempted to recreate that inimitable Korngold sound.

I hope that you enjoy the finished work as much as those of us involved enjoyed its creation.

BLACK SUNDAY and BARON BLOOD (BCD 3034)

Black Sunday, the film and its music

MENTION THE NAME Mario Bava in a crowded room and you will likely draw blank stares. But mention that he directed BLACK SUNDAY and some of those faces will just as quickly wax with enthusiasm, nostalgia, and the most delicious sort of dread. The movie's cultists always say the same thing: "It traumatized me." The fact that you're reading this indicates that BLACK SUNDAY probably had the same effect on you.

This Italian-made film¾known in its native country as La Maschera del demonio ("The Mask of Satan," 1960) marked the directorial debut of Bava, who had spent the previous two decades as one of Italy's top cinematographers. Bava was elevated to the ranks of his second profession at the rather late age of 48, after successfully completing a number of films abandoned by other directors, saving Lionello Santi's Galatea Films on more than one occasion from bankruptcy. Bava's highly colorful, impressionistic photography had a knack for transforming actors of little or no experience into cinematic icons, such as Gina Lollobrigida and Steve Reeves. BLACK SUNDAY¾loosely based on Nikolay Gogol's classic ghost story "Viy"¾was his all-too-successful attempt to bestow the same kind of larger-than-life glamor on an unearthly figure of fright, a villainess whom audiences would find chilling yet sexually irresistible.

Chosen for the dual role of the innocent heroine and her wicked undead ancestor was Barbara Steele, a British-born actress of dark and exotic appearance whose arrival in Hollywood coincided with an extended 1959 strike by the Screen Actors Guild. Tired of waiting for the green light to work, the multilingual Steele availed herself to the European film market and was given the role of a lifetime. Her indelible performance as the Dark Lady of Bava's sepulchral sonnet took her career in an unexpected direction, instantly enthroning her as The Queen of Horror. Steele later appeared in films by Federico Fellini, Volker Schlondorff, Jonathan Demme and David Cronenberg but she never found another director as sensitive to her unique persona as Mario Bava. They never worked together again.

Bava's film was released throughout most of Europe in 1960, with the exception of Great Britain, where its stylized violence kept it officially banned until 1968. It was quickly snapped up for US distribution by American International Pictures, but remained unreleased in America until the following year. AIP's James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff had been packaging homegrown horrors since 1955, but they found themselves rather daunted by this, their first European horror acquisition. In Europe to this day, horror films are habitually forbidden to viewers under the age of 18¾which, of course, was precisely the audience on which Arkoff and Nicholson had built their fledgling empire! After deleting some pioneering instances of spurting gore (notably a vampire staked through its eye!), along with one or two dialogue scenes that were deemed superfluous, the power of BLACK SUNDAY remained essentially undiminished.

Perhaps the most significant of AIP's editorial changes was their decision to eliminate its original Italian score, composed by Roberto Nicolosi. Nicolosi's score was well-conceived but underorchestrated and thinly recorded, laying bare the film's otherwise well-disguised budgetary limitations; it also followed the Italian tradition of emphasizing the film's romantic aspects, which Arkoff and Nicholson knew their target audience would greet with a steady flurry of candy bar wrappers.

The task of rescoring BLACK SUNDAY was entrusted to Les Baxter, who had been scoring low-budget horror films since THE BLACK SLEEP (1956), while also enjoying success as the leading avatar of "exotica" music with top-selling albums like RITUAL OF THE SAVAGE. Exotica perhaps best described as easy listening music with primitive (predominantly Polynesian) undertones continued to inform Baxter's motion picture scores, particularly in its use of bizarre instrumentation and sound effects, long after he had abandoned this innovative phase for a more straightforward recording career. Baxter's first AIP assignment Roger Corman's THE HOUSE OF USHER (1960) was the company's first major breakthrough, and Baxter's lushly decadent orchestrations were commonly singled out for praise in reviews. BLACK SUNDAY was therefore a reward for Baxter, as it had been for Bava. With Baxter's blood-and-thunder score in place, AIP finally released BLACK SUNDAY with an unprecedented (and unheeded) "No One Under the Age of 12 Will Be Admitted" warning attached to all advertising.

By all accounts, it scarred a generation.

The three BLACK SUNDAY suites contained herein were previously released¾albeit howlingly mispackaged¾as the soundtrack to BLACK SABBATH [Tony Thomas Productions, BAX LB-1000], a 1963 Bava film which Baxter also rescored. The album was in fact a blessing in disguise, as the BLACK SUNDAY score is easily the better of the two achievements. To hear this stirring, sorcerous score is to see images from the film replayed in the cinema of one's own mind: the mask of spikes being hammered onto Asa's beautiful face... Katia's first appearance, flanked by two Doberman familiars in the ruins of her family temple... Asa's undead henchman pushing through the earth and scrambling from his grave... the slow-motion passage of a spectral coach through the Black Forest of Mirgorod... the crumbling of the good doctor's will as the cadaverous Asa tempts him with her witch's kiss! Such images! Such sounds! File this music under "Hexotica."

Though Bava's next AIP release, ERIK THE CONQUEROR (1961), was somehow released with its Nicolosi score intact, Baxter went on to rescore the English-language variants of several Bava films, including EVIL EYE (1962) and the lamentable comedy DR. GOLDFOOT AND THE GIRL BOMBS (1966).

Also included on this CD is a never-before-released bonus suite from Baxter's final Bava score, BARON BLOOD (Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga, "The Horrors of Nuremberg Castle," 1972). Like BLACK SUNDAY, BARON BLOOD tells the story of an impoverished European family of entitlement who are mystically confronted with the reanimated form of a truly regal¾and truly evil¾ancestor. In this case, AIP hired Baxter to replace an original score by Stelvio Cipriani. While most of Cipriani's score was quite eerie, it also contained unfortunate passages of travelogue muzak during its Austrian exterior sequences, which seriously undermined the film's more ominous intentions. Baxter's score opens with a startling call-and-answer orchestration of brass and cymbals, its Herrmannesque breathing quality evoking the long-dead lungs of the sadistic Baron Otto von Kleist (Joseph Cotten) as they are shocked back to life by the incantation of a foolish descendant. An icy electronic keyboard pattern follows, descending and ascending, launching a superbly spooky aural tour of the Baron's dungeon, full of bubbling cauldrons and web-infested torture devices, all seemingly abandoned... until the instrumentation places an imperious and inescapable figure of doom in our path... and the chase is on!

BARON BLOOD represents the last work that Mario Bava and Les Baxter ever did for American International; James H. Nicholson's unexpected death in 1973 brought an abrupt end to the company's European co-productions, and the need to rescore them. Bava continued to make small, increasingly personal horror films until his own premature death in 1980, at the age of 66. Baxter eventually returned to macabre movie music with his well-received score for MGM/UA's THE BEAST WITHIN (1982).

Bava and Baxter. A marriage made in Hollywood. This disc contains the best of their work together.

I dare you to play it in the dark.

EXCESSIVE FORCE (BCD 3036)

About the Music

A composer's first look at a film is often crucial. I think the nature of a score is born in the unconscious, probably at first sight. On first viewing Excessive Force, I felt the film physically, as a kind of street ballet. The opening sequence, in which Thomas Griffith is working out, felt to me like an angry dance, a ritual of rage. The many fight scenes which followed also carried a high energy choreographed feeling. My approach to the music was therefore essentially rhythmic and coloristic. The only extended melodic element is the Love Theme (performed on electric guitar by the talented Carl Verheyen), which opens the album and appears occasionally throughout.The rhythmic patterns are often stopstart, involving irregular accents and unpredictable pauses, based as they are on the kickboxing style of fight which characterizes the action scenes. This is most apparent in "Coke Bust" (7) and the fight eruptions in "Devlin on the Roof" (8), "Farm House Pursuit" (10), "Barn Fight" (12), and elsewhere. The colors in the musical palette were chosen for rough, gritty qualities. These included various distorted electric guitar sounds, edgy basses, a battery of odd percussion effects, and some standard orchestral techniques; col legno violins, hardmallet tymps, muted low brass, etc.The acoustic elements of the score were performed and recorded digitally onto computer hard drive and edited in Digidesign's Sound Tools software program. The sequenced MIDI materials (keyboards, percussion, etc.) were played, synchronized and integrated with the recorded tracks by use of the Digital Performer program from Mark of the Unicorn.

About the Composer

Charles Bernstein is an Emmy Award winning Los Angeles composer. His many film and television scores cover a wide range of styles from the classic remake of Jack London's The Sea Wolf starring Charles Bronson and Christopher Reeve, to the horror genre Nightmare on Elm Street, The Entity, and Steven King's Cujo. He has also composed scores for many Emmy winning television productions, including Michael Mann's Drug Wars series, Hallmark's Caroline?, Lou Gossett, Jr. as Sadat, and The Long Hot Summer with Don Johnson, Cybill Shepherd and Jason Robards.

JERRY FIELDING 2 (BCD 4003)

Track Titles

Scorpio (14 cues, TT: 43:28)
Johnny Got His Gun Suite (13:39)
A War of Children Suite (12:10)

JERRY FIELDING 3 (BCD 4004)

Track Titles

Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (23:03)
The Getaway (17:39)
The Gambler Suite (22:24)

JERRY FIELDING 4 (BCD 4005)

Track Titles

"Chato Pursued"...............20:05
"Chato takes his Toll"........20:55
Mr. Horn Suite................14:46

Chato's Land (1971/72) was perhaps the most creatively satisfying period in Jerry Fielding's career. During this time he composed music for eight feature films, two television movies, ten television pilots (both sold and unsold), and multiple episodes of five regular television series. Having "arrived" as a composer relatively late in life, Fielding felt it practically impossible to say no to offers of work. He enjoyed all the media forms, but felt most at home with movies. He loved the art, and would break his neck trying to improve his own contributions as well as enhancing the films for which he wrote. Chato's Land was Fielding's first released movie of 1972 and his second western for British director, Michael Winner. Following Lawman (1970), Winner again sought to explore the rough-and-ready world of the old West. Telling a straight tale of race hatred, Chato's Land announces its premise in the pre-credit sequence. Chato (Charles Bronson), an Apache "Breed," kills the local sheriff in self defense after verbal provocation. As the credits roll, Quincy (Jack Palance), a former Confederate Officer with a ton of demons on his back, organizes a posse. Soon, the town psychos are all riled up and itching to kill. Quincy leads his band of reliable character actors (Richard Basehart, James Whitmore, Richard Jordan, Victor French, Simon Oakland and Ralph Waite among them) into a hostile "land," one which they can neither control or conquer. Chato is at first prepared to simply "lose" the posse in his territory before returning to his home and family, but the posse continues to stew in the desert sun, fighting themselves as well as the terrain while their desire for blood grows at a furious pace. Somehow, they locate Chato's hideout, and when he is away roping horses, the posse slakes its thirst with a bit of rape and murder. Chato's woman survives, but his kin doesn't, and after he rescues the brutalized girl, he destroys the posse one by one. Fielding's impressive score is notable for its non-reliance on familiar western motifs. Instead he conjures a uniquely interesting musical language that creates an all-pervasive chilling barbarity; a cruelty that is always present, never romanticized and seemingly part of the "land" itself. The music swirls around the luckless protagonists, closing in upon them and ultimately shutting them down. When Chato squats on a rock to watch the hapless antics of his victims, he is accompanied by a rhythmic "Indian" pulse that relentlessly broadens into a repeating figure of dense, icy orchestration. The motifs are like the desert itself, rough-hewn, as old as time, pitiless and entirely without mercy. The two parts of Chato's Land that comprise the score as presented on this CD are taken directly from a newly discovered tape that was in fact Fielding's own original album mock-up. In 1972, in anticipation of record company interest, Fielding prepared a Chato's Land album, conceived as two sides, roughly splitting in half the film's chronology. As no record company came forward, the tape laid dormant (although United Artists Japan did release the Main Title as a 45). Disillusioned with this apathy, Fielding put the project aside until 1978 when he donated six cues for presentation on Citadel's "Four Film Suites" album. This then, is Chato's Land as the composer originally intended, a two-part battlefield of sonic glory; an unforgiving eulogy for hate and death, a gut-churning tribute to Man's unfailing stupidity.

Despite unquestioned success on the feature film side of the genre, Jerry Fielding composed only two Western scores for television: Noon Wine, the ABC Stage 67 that was his first collaboration with Sam Peckinpah, and Mr. Horn, a two-part, four hour film that aired on CBS in February, 1979. Mr. Horn was the first of two competing biographies of the legendary Indian scout and gunfighter Tom Horn to reach the public. Steve McQueen's much-troubled Tom Horn would be released to theaters the following year. David Carradine played the title role; Richard Widmark was his mentor and friend, grizzled old tracker Al Sieber; and Karen Black played Horn's sometime lover, whom he encounters again years later, after his celebrated career as a Pinkerton detective. William Goldman, who had become fascinated with the character while researching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, wrote the script, which remains his only work for television. Shot in Mexico, the film--acclaimed by critics--chronicled the hard-drinking Horn's recruitment by Sieber and his capture of Geronimo in 1885; his disillusionment with the Army after its appalling mistreatment of the Apache chief; and his work as a bounty hunter for Wyoming cattle barons that ended with his hanging in 1901. Mr. Horn ranks among Fielding's richest works for the small screen, containing echoes of several of his earlier Western scores including The Wild Bunch (1969), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and especially Lawman (1970). Like Tom Horn, Fielding was a maverick who railed against the system and was, tragically, snuffed out in his prime. A year later, Fielding would be awarded a posthumous Emmy for High Midnight. The Television Academy's acknowledgement of his genius was, sadly, too little and too late.

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