This very generously-filled disc provides a splendid cross-section of Malcolm Arnold's brilliant work as a composer of film-music. Not only has he a full 100 film-scores to his credit, full of strikingly memorable ideas, the expressive range he uses is astonishingly wide. In this very well-chosen group of five scores—all but one turned into concert works by Christopher Palmer—you range from the aggressive sweet-sour contrasts of Arnold's best-known score, the Oscar-winning Bridge on the River Kwai, to the classic feature-film panoply of The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, by way of the charming chamber-scale inspiration of Whistle down the Wind and the bluff yet finely pointed clog-dance music of Hobson's Choice.
Only The Sound Barrier music comes in a concert work devised by Arnold himself, what he describes as a Rhapsody for Orchestra, relatively brief in its contrasting of an elaborate cross-rhythm waltz-sequence with eerie space-music (high piccolos prominent) and sombrely funereal music with timpani ostinato. My own favourite here is the delightful little suite of three linked pieces that Palmer has taken from Whistle down the Wind, the touching film about three children on a remote Lancashire farm finding an escaped criminal and mistaking him for Christ. The chamber scoring, with brilliant solos for individual instruments in turn, is both delicate and warmly involving, including one of Arnold's catchiest tunes.
There are plenty of those. One of the two big tunes in The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (the film about Gladys Aylward's mission to China) has a striking resemblance to Lerner and Loewe's ''Almost like being in love'' from Brigadoon, but surges all the more effectively for that. The processional use of ''This Old Man'' for the children's march is touching too. The main clog-dance theme in Hobson's Choice is first cousin of the clog dance in the ballet, La fille mal gardee, but that too is most effective, not least when in the finale it emerges in counterpoint with the main love theme.
Arnold's mastery of counterpointing one theme against another, Sullivan-style, was most striking in the memorable score for The Bridge on the River Kwai, but there, sadly, the laws of copyright have got in the way of bringing together the original Kenneth Alford March, ''Colonel Bogey'', and Arnold's gloss on it, meant to be played simultaneously. ''Colonel Bogey'' and ''The River Kwai March'' are presented here separately, but not superimposed as in the film: a pity. At nearly half-an-hour the Kwai suite is on the long side, but the variety and colour are extraordinary, including a ''Jungle Trek'' movement full of exotic percussion and a richly poetic ''Sunset'' sequence. This after all is the score that most film-fanciers will have as top priority.
Richard Hickox conducts the LSO with splendid panache, and the playing is heartfelt. The Chandos engineers have responded with recording of spectacular range and colour. As so often Christopher Palmer crowns his work as a most sensitive arranger with superb notes, fascinatingly informative. There are not many discs of a composer's film-music as varied or as richly enjoyable as this.'