Here is the latest in the Naxos Film Music
Classics series to have migrated from Marco Polo, where it first
appeared over a decade ago. This re-issue series, in updated
livery, complete – in this case – with the flaming mansion house
is going from strength to strength. And here we have one of
the veritable masterpieces of the film genre, Waxman’s 1940
film score for Rebecca.
The original film score ran to just over
two hours of which 72 minutes have been recorded here. Sometimes
this is of little account as producer David Selznick inserted
other pieces of music, such as a cue by Max Steiner from the
film Little Lord Fauntleroy. Another piece by Steiner was used
in the film for the Beatrice scene but in this recording it’s
been excised and Waxman’s original cue has been recorded. Some
pieces that were, in effect recycled Waxman were also included
– the scores and parts for the Mrs Danvers cue didn’t exist
and reconstructive surgery has been undertaken using the composer’s
notes to reinstate it.
Whatever the intricacies
of re-instatement and removal the score remains substantially
intact and is explored with real élan and vigour in this performance,
Adriano revealing himself once more to be something of a past-master
of his art and the Slovak orchestra to be a body both well disciplined
and capable of considerable expression.
The opening is tense
and turbulent before the Hotel Lobby waltz lends a flighty air
to the proceedings – flirty flutes following in the tennis scenes
and plenty of warm lyricism. There are some Gershwinesque clarinets
in the following cues and fervent strings as well as a big role
for the orchestra’s leader in the Entrance Hall-Mrs Danvers
cues. In the film that role fell to the liquid and burnished
Louis Kaufman but here the job is adeptly taken by the more
equable Viktor Šimčisko.
Signs of Waxman’s
experimental ear can be gauged by the Morning Room scene – all
strange, nasty tension explored through the novachord and in
the ensuing scenes where the cor anglais is pensive and the
strings similarly uneasy. This is a little tone poem in itself
and should be standard issue kit to aspiring film composers,
novachord or no novachord. But Waxman imbues the Sketching scene
with a warm ambling gait and threads another languid little
waltz as well for the Ball. Waxman’s conjuring up of the showering
Rockets after the ball is masterly as well – they flicker at
their apex and shower down earthwards presaging the ominous
brass tread of the Dawn cue. And then, before the conflagration
and the noble end, we have the romanticism, with solo violin,
of the Fireplace cue. All this is seamless and masterly.
At budget price
interested parties could hardly refuse such a textually intelligent,
well-played and con amore production.
Jonathan Woolf
Viktor Šimčisko (violin)
