Rozsa: Three Choral Suites: Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis, and King of Kings.Rozsa: Three Choral Suites: Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis Quo Vadis novel of Rome under Nero, describing the imprisonment, crucifixion, and burning of Christians. [Pol. Lit.: Magill I, 797] See : Persecution , and King of Kings. Erich Kunzel Erich Kunzel, Jr. (b. March 21 1935, New York City) is an American conductor. A timpanist and music arranger at his high school in Greenwich, Connecticut, he received his first music degree from Dartmouth College. He also studied at Harvard and Brown University. , Cincinnati Pops Orchestra The Cincinnati Pops Orchestra is a pops orchestra based in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States, founded in 1977. Erich Kunzel, celebrating his 30th season with the orchestra in 2005–2006, continues to lead the Pops today. ; Mormon Tabernacle Choir The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is a large choir sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Since July 15, 1929, the choir has performed a weekly radio broadcast called Music and the Spoken Word . Telarc CD80631. Miklos Rozsa was to film music of the 1950s and '60s what Max Steiner For other persons named Max Steiner, see Max Steiner (disambiguation). Maximilian Raoul Walter Steiner (born May 10, 1888 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary; died December 28, 1971 in Hollywood, California) was an Austrian-American composer of music for theater production shows and , Franz Waxman, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold Erich Wolfgang Korngold (May 29, 1897 – November 29, 1957) was a 20th century romantic composer. Biography Born in an assimilated Jewish home in Brno, Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic), Erich was the son of the music critic Julius Korngold. had been to the '30s and '40s and what John Williams has been since the 1970s. Rozsa, along with fellow 50s' and 60s' composer Dimitri Tiomkin, meant big, really BIG, film music. Epic scores for epic movies. And who better to present such music than Eric Kunzel, the most-popular record conductor of all time, with the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Did I mention "Big"? The three movie pieces collected on this disc derive from suites that Rozsa began but never finished. They have been arranged and reconstructed by Daniel Robbins, Christopher Palmer, Julian Kershaw, Joseph D. Price, and conductor Kunzel. Each suite lasts about twenty minutes, with the disc containing over an hour of music. The unifying elements are Christ, Christianity, and the Roman Empire. All of the music conveys pictorial variations of those central ideas. Things start off with director William Wyler's Ben-Hur, subtitled "A Tale of the Christ," starring Charlton Heston, Jack Hawkins, and Stephen Boyd, and released in 1959. It won Academy Awards for just about everything that year, including Best Music for Rozsa. It's probably the finest of the three scores represented here, with "The Parade of the Charioteers" the highlight. Next is Mervyn LeRoy's Quo Vadis?, starring Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr, released in 1951. It was nominated for quite a few Oscars, including music, but didn't win any. The music doesn't have quite the grand sweep of Ben-Hur, but the "Assyrian Dance" is most colorful. Things wrap up with director Nicholas Ray's King of Kings, starring Jeffrey Hunter, released in 1961. It contains the best single motif in its musical argument, a theme still almost instantly recognizable. Needless to say, old hand Kunzel brings everything off in the most lofty and imposing manner, with the Tabernacle Tabernacle (tăb`ərnăk'əl), in the Bible, the portable holy place of the Hebrews during their desert wanderings. It was a tent, like the portable tent-shrines used by ancient Semites, set up in each camp; eventually it housed the Ark Choir lending solemn and mellifluous mel·lif·lu·ous adj. 1. Flowing with sweetness or honey. 2. Smooth and sweet: "polite and cordial, with a mellifluous, well-educated voice" H.W. Crocker III. support. The sound is pretty much what we have come to expect from this source; I mean, Kunzel has made about 800 such recordings now for Telarc. The sound is big, to match the music; it's wide spread, wide ranging, open, vibrant, deep, resonant, not entirely transparent, but fairly realistic. I missed El Cid. It was Rozsa's best score. Oh, well. No Romans, I guess. |
|
||||||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion