Legendary Hollywood Golden Age Songs and Instrumentals: Music from,Films by Korngold & in Bloomington, MN

This is a brilliant, affecting, even quietly dazzling collection, and its impact is even more astounding when one considers that it is built on smaller, lesser-known moments in music from Hollywood. The opening piece,
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
's
"Rapture"
from the 1944
Warner Bros.
production
Between Two Worlds
, is worth the price of the disc by itself, a touching and yet darkly ominous solo piano piece that could have easily found a berth in the recital hall without a lot of effort.
Albert Dominguez
's performance brings out all of the richness of expression and subtle shadings in the work. The vocal piece
"Love for Love"
from
Escape Me Never
is rather less memorable in its writing and soprano
Maria Martino
's performance, but the
Sonnet for Vienna for cello and piano
from the same movie is a ravishingly lovely work. The four
Korngold
songs from
Give Us This Night
-- written in conjuntion with
Oscar Hammerstein II
-- hold up much better and show what a potential contributor to the musical stage
might have been under other circumstances, but the piano/cello instrumentals from
Devotion
and
Deception
tend to overshadow them. The
Max Steiner
vocal material is somewhat more familiar, as well as overtly sentimental, especially
"It Can't Be Wrong"
Now, Voyager
, if only because the latter song was once vamped by
Bugs Bunny
in a
cartoon. Given that background,
Martino
does come off a bit like
Margaret Dumont
at a
Marx Brothers
party, almost comically formal though her operatic style is obviously the way
Steiner
felt the song should be remembered. From a decade earlier comes the beautiful solo piano
Unfinished Sonata
A Bill of Divorcement
, with its question/answer pattern and lush
arpeggios
. The songs from
Saratoga Trunk
So Big
(oddly enough two films that are no longer in distribution) based on novels by
Edna Ferber
, fill some holes in
's output, but much more interesting is the duo piano version of
The Rhapsody
City for Conquest
-- one does rather wish that the makers could have secured a recording of the orchestral version of the piece, which figures in the film's wrenching emotional climax. The album ends with the free-flowing sentimentality of
"All My Life"
They Died With Their Boots On
. The sound throughout, as one would expect from a contemporary recording, is excellent, and the annotation is reasonably informative despite some slight inaccuracies in plot descriptions. ~ Bruce Eder