Just as in popular romantic fiction there are genres, such as the ‘Chateau novel’, in the 1940s the ‘Concerto film score’ had a considerable vogue. The fashion probably stemmed from the 1938 film Moonlight Sonata, starring Paderewski, but it really took hold with Dangerous Moonlight, featuring Richard Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, in 1941. This was one of the great successes in Britain in the Second World War. The sheet music of the theme sold over three million copies, and there have been over 100 recordings of it – the most recent, before this new CD, the remarkable disc on ASV devoted to Addinsell’s music.
Its pseudo-Rachmaninov scoring and flashy virtuoso solos were clearly the inspiration for two other celebrated pieces included on this CD – Cornish Rhapsody by Hubert Bath, from Love Story (1945), and Charles Williams’s Dream of Olwen for While I Live (1947), which became so popular that the film was reissued under the title of the music.
All but two of the pieces on this collection are from the 1940s. The later excursions into the style are Richard Rodney Bennett’s music for Murder on the Orient Express (perhaps a conscious salute to the old films) and Leonard Pennario’s music for Midnight on the Cliffs (from the Doris Day-Louis Jourdain vehicle, Julie).
The most ambitious scores are from those two Hollywood masters Miklos Rozsa and Bernard Herrmann. Rozsa’s music for Hitchcock’s Spellbound was not originally conceived as a concerto: Rozsa arranged the film score later, adding the solo part for the Theremin, which gives it its strange nightmare sound. Herrmann’s Concerto Macabre from the 1944 Hangover Square was the climax of the film, when the mad pianist sets fire to the concert-hall. Philip Fowke plays all the pieces with affection and panache, and the RTE Concert Orchestra under Proinnsias O’Duinn attempt the period style. There is a uniformity about a lot of the music which is shown up by the inclusion of the Rosza and Herrmann pieces, but if you’ve always wished that the Warsaw Concerto were longer, this is the very disc for you.'