Los Angeles was a magnet
to European émigré composers
fleeing pogroms whether Nazi or Soviet
during the 1930s. The city yielded employment
and teaching opportunities for music
celebrities who could almost call their
own tune. If they had a foreign name
well that helped as well. LA provided
employment in the film industry for
pragmatists. Idealists found it a soul-destroying
place but at least the storm-troopers
were thousands of miles away.
As the end of the Second
World War came in sight Nathaniel Shilkret
hit upon a grand collaborative project.
Shilkret was director of light music
at RCA Victor Records. He was also a
composer active in the film studios
and a conductor. In the music world
he knew pretty much everyone who was
anyone. He approached six other composers
with an ambitious collaborative project
to work on large-scale tableaux for
orchestra, chorus, and narrator. The
chosen texts were from the Book of
Genesis. The composers were Castelnuovo-Tedesco
in exile from Italy, Milhaud from France,
Alexandre Tansman from Poland and France
and Ernst Toch from Austria. The illustrious
giants who provided the great flanking
buttresses for the work were Schoenberg
and Stravinsky.
The resulting Genesis
Suite had a single live performance,
in 1945, by the
Janssen Symphony Orchestra at
the Wilshire Ebel Theatre in Los Angeles.
The week after Shilkret took the same
forces into RCA’s Hollywood studio for
a privately-commissioned recording.
While Stravinsky and Schoenberg kept
copies of their movements all the performing
materials were lost in a fire at Shilkret’s
home. In 1998 musicologist James Westby
found manuscript orchestral scores of
the Milhaud and Castelnuovo-Tedesco
movements filed at the Library of Congress,
as well as short scores for the episodes
by Shilkret, Tansman and Toch. Patrick
Russ reconstructed these three movements
with the aid of the private recording;
now that I would also like to
hear! It will not be as virile and immediate
as the present recording; that’s for
sure.
Schoenberg was
well chosen for his uncompromising portrayal
of the primordial chaotic miasma. The
music is suitably dodecaphonic - whirling
and active. Shilkret was a film
music composer and his eclectic opulence
in The Creation supplies a richly
stocked and constantly allusive Hollywood-style
score. The music is super-Straussian
with the vocalising choir painting the
dawn of light in a blindingly cinematic
evocation. One can easily imagine a
film to accompany this music and narration.
It is very much a case of the Bible
according to Heston and Mature. Great
fun - an example of saturated cinema
kitsch. Golden Age film score aficionados
must lose no time and get a copy of
this disc immediately. Tansman’s
Adam and Eve is much more subtle
but still vividly imagined and pictorial.
Tansman uses a developed Ravelian style
- impressionism on steroids. There are
several moments where the debt to Ravel’s
Daphnis is direct and unashamed.
The Milhaud movement takes us
through the tale of Cain and Abel.
It is a brisk and vigorous retelling
with dramatic music. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
is in this case closest to Shilkret
in style. He too was a Hollywood film
music composer. His The Flood
is stormily histrionic and his tender
music is genuinely touching (2:58 tr.
5) as you find whenever the narration
speaks of Noah and his family. Something
of the same loving kindness can be heard
in Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony.
Ernst Toch’s The Rainbow/The
Covenant provides the work’s optimistic
centre of gravity with its repeated
imperious concluding fanfares. Stravinsky
admits both narration and choral
singing into his Babel. The style
links with various of his concert works
including Oedipus Rex and the
Symphonies of Wind Instruments.
Throughout each of the six movements,
where there is narration, the speaker
changes among the five from one section
to the next within a movement.
As a single work this
‘collaboration’ does not quite work
as an entity. The end of Babel is
too inconclusive to provide a sense
of journey’s end. Perhaps one day this
will be redressed. For now this is a
fascinating record of a remarkable moment
in time. Its chrome-plated musical sensationalism
is enjoyable provided you have no hang-ups
about kitsch. I thought it was great
fun. I recommend it to listeners who
have already contracted the revelatory
bug that hangs around the music of a
generation of composers who wrote in
exile.
Rob Barnett
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin/Gerard Schwarz
