|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
|||||||
December 1999 Film Music CD Reviews |
Film Music Editor: Ian Lace |
|
THE FILM MUSIC OF ARTHUR HONEGGER (1892-1950) And JACQUES IBERT (1890-1962)
A composite review by Didier C. Deutsch
As every student of film music knows, the often neglected, often maligned art of film scoring found its genesis in the works of modern classical composers. While pioneers like Erich-Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner laid out the rules by which instrumental scores have been composed since the 1930s, when most filmmakers began to add music to their films, much of what was heard in earlier productions was borrowed from the classics or began with traditional classical composers such as Camille Saint-Saens, whose music for the silent L'assassinat du duc de Guise, in 1908, gave an early voice to this pseudo historical recreation of the war that opposed Catholics and Protestants (or Huguenots, as they were called at the time) in XVIth century France. Over the years, other prominent classical composers also delved, some quite extensively, in film music, among them Aaron Copland, who brought a distinctive Americana flavor to such films as Of Mice and Men (1939), Our Town (1940), and The Red Pony (1949); Serge Prokoviev, whose contributions to Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan The Terrible (1944-46) still rank among the most impressive scores ever composed for the movies; Dimitri Shostakovich, who illustrated himself with New Babylon (1929), The Battle Of Siberia (1940), The Fall Of Berlin (1945), The Condemned Of Altona (1963), and Hamlet (1964); and Leonard Bernstein, whose music for On The Waterfront (1954), profoundly marked this celebrated film directed by Elia Kazan. Add to this list two French composers, Jacques Ibert, who created the scores for The Italian Straw Hat (1927), Don Quichotte (1934), Macbeth (1948), and Marianne de ma jeunesse (1954), among others; and Arthur Honegger, one of the most influential serious composers of the 20th century, who elevated the art of film scoring with his music for Abel Gance's epic Napoleon (1926), Pacific 231 (1931), Les Miserables (1934), Mayerling (1937), and Jeanne au bucher (Joan At The Stake)(1954). The link between classical music and film music through Honegger is even made more suggestive when one recalls that it was he who advised Miklos Rozsa, then a much admired but impoverished classical composer, to turn his skills to writing for the movies in the early 1940s, prompting the latter to work on The Jungle Book and The Thief Of Bagdad, a move that paved the way for one of the most successful careers in film scoring. In the first days of its existence, Marco Polo, a label dedicated to the rerecordings of significant film scores, paid a belated homage to some of the works by Ibert and Honegger in a series of CDs that have long become much sought after by collectors and fans of film music, all featuring the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, led by the single-named Swiss conductor, Adriano. One of the first great composers to express unbridled enthusiasm for the movies, Honegger often could be seen on the sets during shooting, impregnating himself with the atmosphere of the films he scored, and eventually creating cues that revealed, in the words of Adriano writing in one of the CD's liner notes, "astonishingly advanced ideas on the function of music in the cinema." Well aware of the limitations imposed on a composer by the medium itself, Honegger rejected the notion of film music being synchronized with movement on the screen, opting instead to create music that complemented the action, commented on it, and eventually served as an extra form of its visual expression. He reached the pinnacle of his art in the two most realized scores he wrote - Abel Gance's Napoleon and the 1934 Les Miserables. A massive, six-hour recreation of the Napoleonic saga, Napoleon made cinematic history in more ways than one: always a trendsetter, Abel Gance used for the first time the camera as an integral part of the action, moving it around instead of keeping it static as had been the case until then, thus giving the film a fluidity that set it apart from anything that had been done before; also aware of the visual limitations imposed by the small screen in use at the time, Gance devised the first big screen projection, in some instances simultaneously filming the same scene from three different angles, in a device that would have to wait another forty years to be perfected with the Cinerama process. As innovative as Gance's technical prowesses might have been, Napoleon also benefitted grandly from the score Honegger devised for it, one of the first instances of a large scale work being applied to a film of this magnitude. But because Gance constantly worked on the film, editing and reediting it, the final score - a combination of themes borrowed from the composer's other works, original cues, and compilation of folk tunes - ultimately sounded disjointed and, in the words of a critic at the time of the film's premiere, "cacophonous." Today, many of the composer's original cues have been lost, and his score only exists in fragmentary form. In a sad turn of events, the film was released almost at the time the movies began to talk; as a result, it was summarily dismissed as old fashioned and dated, and fell in unjust oblivion, despite Gance's vain efforts to try and post-synchronize it and present it again to new generations of filmgoers. In 1980, it was shown in London in a new version edited by Kevin Brownlow, who had spent more than two decades reconstructing it, with a new score by Carl Davis; the following year, it was brought to the U.S. for a roadshow presentation that was ill-advisedly rescored by Carmine Coppola. If the Davis score can be said to more closely match Abel Gance's initial concepts about his massive undertaking, the eight selections from the original score by Honegger, vibrantly brought to symphonic life in the Adriano recording, belie the idea that his work was flawed to begin with, and thoroughly evoke the breadth and scope of the film itself, in a way that may be different from Carl Davis' but no less compelling. To put it simply, it is magnificent, and only makes one regret that so little of it actually was saved. Though the score evidenced moments of sheer melodic beauty and quietness ("Calme," "La romance de Violine"), what mostly impresses here is the sweep and grandeur of the remaining cues (some based on the revolutionary folk tune "Dansons la carmagnole," others using Rouget de Lisle's "Marseillaise" and Mehul's "Chant du depart") which match in epic scope the visual elements in Gance's film ("Napoleon," "Les ombres," "Les mendiants de la gloire," "Interlude et final"). In every way, this is solid film music that evokes much more than just a passing vision of an extraordinary film. [Honegger's original cues can also be heard in another recording, released by Erato, with additional selections for the film composed by Marius Constant, who also conducts the Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, in a different, albeit no less fascinating attempt at giving a more complete musical expression to Gance's masterpiece.] Les Miserables was composed in 1934 for the fourth screen retelling of the classic Victor Hugo novel, another massive five-hour undertaking, originally shown in three parts running consecutively in different theaters, but eventually reedited by its director, Raymond Bernard, into two parts, each with a running time of 100 minutes. Particularly memorable for its close visual description of the novel, its superb cast, and its fluid direction, Les Miserables starred Harry Baur as Jean Valjean and Charles Vanel as Javert, and preceded by one year Hollywood's most famous version with Frederic March and Charles Laughton in the leading roles. For it, Honegger wrote another majestic score, an impressive achievement in its own right, which unfortunately suffered when the film was reedited. Lovingly reconstructed from existing cues and sketches, and assembled to give it greater symphonic continuity, this is an essential recording that should belong in every collection. In creating it, Honegger displayed a rare talent for musical images that are attractive and catchy, solidly built around melodic material that challenges the listener and compels repeated hearing. Though the cues are short for the most part, they make a lasting impression, with the longer "Tempete sous un crane," "La foire a Montfermeil," "Le jardin de la rue Plumet" and "Dans les egouts" (the only cue without a melodic motif) surprising for their vitality and emotional impact. The other recordings mentioned here present various suites from scores the composer wrote for a wide range of films made in the late 1930s and early 1940s, in which his colorful compositions translate in musical terms the dramatic narrative of each film. Of these, the three most important are Mayerling, a historical drama made in 1936; Regain, from 1937; and Crime et chatiment, from 1934, in which the composer prominently featured the early electronic Ondes Martenot. Interestingly, the Ondes Martenot were also used by Jacques Ibert for this 1935 score for Golgotha, a re-telling of the life and passion of Christ, directed by Julien Duvivier, in which Robert Le Vigan portrayed the Messiah. Ibert, a composer better known in concert halls for works such as "Divertissement" and "Escales," also enjoyed a prolific career as a film composer, with some 30 scores to his credit, between 1933 and 1956. While many of those might not have been full-length contributions, they bore Ibert's distinctive style and taste for brilliant orchestral colors, that contrasted with Honegger's darker moods (though both men worked together on two operas, and Honegger was known to have collaborated with others on some film works, they never teamed for a film score). Starring the great Russian basso Fedor Chaliapin, it seemed only natural that Don Quichotte, directed by G.W. Pabst in 1933, should include some songs. The four tunes created by Ibert, with words by Pierre de Ronsard and Alexandre Arnoux, show a Spanish influence, much in keeping with the subject of the film and Ibert's own musical leanings. While the Golgotha suite showcases the composer in a more dramatic vein, the real delight in this release is the series of cues Ibert created for Orson Welles' Macbeth, itself another sadly neglected masterpiece worthy of a thorough reexamination. Solidly defined and powerful in its dramatic exposition, the score provided a solid anchor to this screen adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy, in which the eerie "The Ghost Of Banquo" and the martial "Triumph Of Macduff's Armies" particularly stand out. As with the Honegger titles, the CD casts a long glance at a composer not known for his movie scores, but whose contributions should be remembered and acknowledged among the most descriptive and vivid ever created for the screen. Overall performance by the CSR Symphony Orchestra is superb, with the great DDD sonics adding immeasurably to one's pleasure. Reviewer Didier C. Deutsch
All albums
|
Didier C. Deutsch
All albums
Reviews carry sales links
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
| Return to Index | ||||||||||||||||||||||
The Slovak Radio Symphony
Orchestra (Bratislava) conducted by Adriano
