Stanley Black is best
remembered as a conductor of mostly
dance and light music with the BBC Dance
Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra,
BBC Northern Ireland Orchestra, the
Osaka Symphony Orchestra and the Boston
Pops Orchestra (of which he was the
first non-American conductor).
Black was a prolific
writer of film scores – writing for
some 200 films between the late 1930s
and the 1980s. Some of the best remembered
films such as Mrs Fitzherbert
(1947), It Always Rains on Sunday
(1947), Laughter in Paradise
(1951) are not represented here. But
it has to be said that many of the films
he scored were frankly B pictures and
pretty awful.
Each of the film scores
in this album (except Blood of the
Vampire) is allocated a suite of
two, three or four movements unimaginatively
labelled Movement I, Movement II etc.
The album opens with
music for the Peter Sellers comedy Battle
of the Sexes based on a clash between
English and American business methods
in a traditional Scottish tweed company.
The music is eclectic and mildly amusing
with a mock pompous opening and tongue-in-cheek
pastiches of Offenbach and other light
classics in the central movement with
helter-skelter slapstick material rubbing
shoulders with Scottish folk music in
the last movement. Much more amusing
is the hilarious take-off of all those
familiar Arabian figures, the belly-dancing
music, bumbling romance and comic camel
material that comprises the Sands
of the Desert score for the Charlie
Drake comedy of 1960. Still on a lighter
note, there is the concluding jolly
3-minute high-spirited music for the
Cliff Richard musical The Young Ones
nodding nicely towards George Gershwin.
Black’s sinister, tense
music for Three Steps to the Gallows
is cast in the tradition of Hollywood
film noire scores especially
those of Miklós Rózsa
... including Rózsa’s gift for
creating tender melodies. Max Steiner
is brought to mind in Black’s romantic
music of the last movement of his music
for another thriller, Stormy Crossing.
Elsewhere in this suite Black creates
some impressive atmospheric seascapes.
Finally to the two
scores for horror films. Blood of
the Vampire is a typical score of
the genre and, in the early part of
the suite, as good as any of them; eerie,
full of bats and blood, gothic gloom,
and screeching menaces. But for much
of its length this music is rather tedious;
so too is the opening movement music
for Jack the Ripper which nods
none too imaginatively or originally
towards Holst and Stravinsky. The eerie
atmospheric material of the central
music and the more tender music of this
score come off better.
Wordsworth and the
BBC Concert Orchestra embrace the comedy
and thrills of this album’s music with
commendable enthusiasm yet one cannot
help feeling that it is not exactly
the most inspired of Chandos’s on-going
series devoted to British Film Music
Ian Lace
BBC Concert Orchestra/Barry Wordsworth 
