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Two Classic Political Film Scores
Silvestre REVUELTAS (1899-1940)
Redes (1935) [34:17]
Aaron COPLAND (1900-1990)
The City (1939) [34:07]
PostClassical Ensemble/Angel Gil-Ordóñez
rec. 15 October 2007 (Copland), 11 May 2014 (Revueltas), Dekelboum Concert Hall, Clarence Smith Performing Arts Center, College Park, USA
NAXOS 8.574350 [68:27]

For both aficionados of film music or admirers of these composers this is an important and valuable disc. Say “film music” to most people and it will probably still conjure up an aural image of heroic brass and sweeping strings. The two scores offered here – written right in the middle of Hollywood’s Golden Age (although neither are Hollywood films) challenge those conventions with convincing economy. The excellent liner quotes André Previn writing about Copland as saying; “What Copland represented in Hollywood [was] “fewer” notes”.

These are key scores for both composers although for very different reasons. Both represent their creator’s first work in the idiom. Revueltas was to score eleven films but he was to die just five years after writing Redes. Since his catalogue ‘lacks’ the standard roster of concertos or symphonies the significance of his film work is proportionally more important. Conversely the Copland score came at a time when he was reconsidering the role and value of a contemporary composer in wider society. Film appealed as an idiom which would instantly reach a far wider audience than a concert hall ever could. However Copland recognised that his modernist scores would alienate that same audience so in The City he was beginning to embrace the populist style that would reach its greatest and most enduring expression with his cowboy ballets, the Fanfare for the Common Man and his Symphony No.3. Billy the Kid dates from the year before The City.

Both scores have been recorded to some degree before. Redes (Nets – the film was released in the USA as The Wave) exists in various compilations and suites on a variety of discs. Most notable are versions by Eduardo Mata on Dorian conducting the  Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra Of Venezuela and another from Enrique Batiz with the Orquesta Filarmónica de la Ciudad de México. This was part of Volume 4 of ASV’s “Musica Mexicana” series that latterly appeared as a box set on Brilliant Classics. Both discs are impressively and idiomatically played but the suite of music drawn from the film score represents just fifteen of so minutes of the 34:17 presented here – and the “missing” music is certainly worth hearing. Copland never created his own suite from The City which is slightly curious given its appeal and its stature. He did include two excerpts as part of his Music for Movies Suite. But to hear anything more of this score there is only one other alternative – a twenty two minute suite play by Jonathan Sheffer and the Eos Orchestra on Telarc. This performance also sounds excellent with Telarc’s high-vis engineering enhancing Copland’s evocative score. But with the demise of Telarc, this twenty year old recording might be hard to track down and again it is missing a significant portion of this attractive score.

So even before considering the artistic worth of this new disc, there is little if any competition. Good to report then that the music-making on this recording is very fine as well. Both performances were originally made as newly recorded soundtracks to DVD releases of the original films. This is significant since it means – by definition – that the pacing of the scores must fit the original film as edited therefore the listener can assume that the music we hear is as close to how the composer intended it for the film as possible. This is useful where comparing the differences in performing approaches between the various available versions. Also the music cues are presented on this disc in the sequence they appeared in the film which again gives the listener a clear sense of the narrative/dramatic arc of the films.

Another key consideration is how significant the role of music was in the original films. According to Joseph Horovitz’s liner, Redes was filmed where scenes were either solely accompanied by music or else were purely dialogue. Very commonly film music is used as “underscoring” where the music cue is literally mixed at a lower level to support the film scene. Instead, in Redes¸ Revueltas’ score acts as a kind of parallel often poetic narrative. This supports the cinematography of the film (by Paul Strand – quoted in the liner as “the biggest widest most commanding talent in the history of American photography”). The film blurs the distinction between drama, documentary and visual poem. In this Revueltas’ rather sombre and often austere score reinforces the powerful imagery. Aside from a couple of cues the music is not explicitly Latin American in flavour but it is certainly powerful and atmospheric. The playing of the PostClassical Ensemble under founder/director Angel Gil-Ordóñez across both scores is consistently adept and impressive even though they were recorded seven years apart. The actual studio sound is clear and detailed without the extra acoustic warmth many concert hall or church acoustics tend to afford.

Both composers were acutely politically aware and Redes deals with the exploitation of a group of fishermen by the unscrupulous ‘bosses’ who control the purchase of the fish they catch – the titular nets are a literal symbol of their trade as well as an allegory for the proscriptive work practices in which they are caught. Although only one actor in the film was a professional this is in effect a story rather than a documentary so Revueltas’ score does seek to underline and highlight the narrative. Hence sequences such as track 4 Funeral and track 6 Good Fishing are brilliant musical evocations of the silently shot scenes they accompany. Given the rather dark nature of the score as a whole the sudden and rather garish major key ending of the score does jar – the original film/soundtrack can be watched on YouTube.

Copland’s The City is more explicitly a documentary film albeit one with a social message. This was filmed for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The concept was fairly simple tracking the development of urban communities from an “ideal” town in early rural America via the alienating struggle of a modern City and grim Mill Town to the shining future where benevolent town planners would recreate Utopian new towns in the future. Ironically the future towns appear as some kind of Stepford Wives community with seemingly no racial minorities present at all. Copland’s most impressive and individual sequences were reserved for the scenes of the clamour and bustle modern city life. On reflection perhaps there should be no surprise as Copland was a child of New York’s East Side so this was an environment he could identify with and actually celebrate. The opening A New England Village was one of the sections ‘saved’ by Copland for his Music for Movies suite and it is certainly a proto Appalachian Spring movement. The most extended and most impressive sequence is titled here The City II [track 14] this includes the Sunday Traffic cue which is the second movement used as part of Music for Movies. In the suite that is a short two and a half minute cue in the film this runs to over eleven minutes. The documentary has no spoken dialogue [there are ‘voice overs’] instead there is an unseen narrator [not included here]. So as with the Revueltas score Copland’s music is relied on to be the sole source of aural reinforcement for the on-screen images. This he achieves most completely in this extended cue with the music mirroring the montage style of the cinematography cutting together the different experiences good and bad of city life. As frustration outweighs happiness so the transition is made to the New Town. The five New Town cues [tracks 15 – 19] are genuinely attractive in Copland’s best “composer-of-the-people” but hard not to hear them as more formulaic and less inspired than the cues that immediately precede them. The complete film with original soundtrack can be viewed on YouTube.

But it is a genuine delight to be able to hear these two accomplished scores by such fine composers complete and receiving such wholly convincing performances. Joseph Horovitz who co-founded the PostClassical Ensemble also produced these recordings as well as contributing the concise but very informative and insightful note. The same team provided a new soundtrack for another pair of seminal American documentary films from the 1930’s Virgil Thomson’s scores for The Plow that broke the Plains and The River. My guess is that Naxos will release those soundtracks on a companion disc and that being the case I will look forward to hearing them very much. A compulsory purchase for anyone interested in these composers or the development of the dedicated film score.

Nick Barnard

Previous review: Néstor Castiglione