wimpel69
11-14-2016, 04:30 PM
This is a new, EAC rip I did of the Waxman album I shared previously in an older rip.
Please request the FLAC link (including the complete
artwork, LOG & CUE files (EAC accurate rip)) in this thread. PMs will be ignored!
This is my own rip. Please do not share my material further, also please
add to my reputation!
Franz Waxman led a variety of musical lives as composer, conductor and impresario. He was born in Konigshutte, Upper Silesia,
Germany, on December 24, 1906, and was the youngest of six children. No one in the family was musical except Franz, who started
piano lessons at the age of seven. His father was an industrialist, and not believing his son could earn a living in music, encouraged him
in a banking career. He worked for two and a half years as a teller and used his salary to pay for lessons in piano, harmony and composition.
He then quit the bank and moved to Dresden and then to Berlin to study music.
During this period he paid for his musical education by playing piano in nightclubs and with the Weintraub Syncopaters, a popular jazz band
of the late 1920s. While with the band he began to do their arrangements, and this led to orchestrating some early German musical films.
Frederick Hollander, who had written some music for the Weintraubs, gave Waxman his first important movie assignment: orchestrating
and conducting Hollander’s score for Josef von Sternberg’s classic film, “The Blue Angel.” The film’s producer, Erich Pommer, who was also
head of the UFA Studios in Berlin, was so pleased with the orchestration of the score that he gave Waxman his first major composing
assignment: Fritz Lang’s version of “Liliom” (1933) which was filmed in Paris after their exodus from Germany. Pommer’s next assignment,
Jerome Kern’s “Music in the Air” (Fox Films, 1934), took him to the United States, and he brought Waxman with him to arrange the music.
Waxman’s first original Hollywood score was James Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), which led to a two-year contract with
Universal as head of the music department. He scored a dozen of the more than 50 Universal films on which he worked as music director.
Among the best known are “Magnificent Obsession, “Diamond Jim” and “The Invisible Ray.”
Two years after he went to Hollywood, Waxman, then 30, signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to compose.
He averaged about seven pictures a year, and it was during this period that he scored such famous Spencer Tracy films as “Captains
Courageous,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Woman of the Year.” In 1937, he was loaned by M-G-M to David O. Selznick for
“The Young at Heart” and was nominated for both Best Original Music and Best Score – the first two of 12 Academy Award nominations
he was to receive for the 144 films he scored in his 32 years in Hollywood. In 1940 he was again loaned to Selznick, this time for
“Rebecca,” and was nominated for his third Academy Award.
Waxman left M-G-M in 1943 and began a long association with Warner Brothers. “Old Acquaintance” is from this period. (Selections
from three more of his Warner Brothers scores can be heard on RCA albums: “Mr. Skeffington” is included in “Classic Film Scores for
Bette Davis,” “To Have and Have Not,” and “The Two Mrs. Carrolls” are included in “Casablanca – Classic Film Scores for Humphrey Bogart,
and “Objective, Burma!” are on “Captive Blood” – Classic Film Scores for Errol Flynn)
In 1947 Waxman founded the Los Angeles International Music Festival, which he was to head for 20 years. World and American
premieres of 80 major works by composers such as Stravinsky, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovitch and Schoenberg were
given at the festival.
By 1947 Waxman had a busy schedule indeed. In addition to devoting a great deal of time to the festival, he was in demand at all the
major studios, was guest conducting symphony orchestras in Europe as well as in the United States and was composing concert music.
For the film “Humoresque” he wrote a special piece based on themes from Bizet’s “Carmen,” which was played by Isaac Stern on the
soundtrack. The “Carmen Fantasie” has become standard repertoire and was recorded by Jascha Heifetz for RCA. Among Waxman’s
other concert works are “Overture for Trumpet and Orchestra,” based on themes from “The Horn Blows at Midnight;” “Sinfonietta for
String Orchestra and Timpani;” a dramatic song cycle “The Song of Terezin,” and an oratorio, “Joshua.”
Waxman won the Academy Award in 1950 for Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” and in 1951 for George Stevens’ “A Place in the Sun.”
For over half a century, he was the only composer to have won the award for Best Score in two successive years. It was during the
‘50s and ‘60s that he composed some of his most important and varied scores. These are represented by the above two Academy
Award winners as well as by “Prince Valiant” and “Taras Bulba.” He had usually been associated with romantic films, but now he
progressed to epic and jazz-oriented scores. “Crime in the Streets,” “The Spirit of St. Louis,” “Sayonara,” “Peyton Place” and
“The Nun’s Story” are also from this period and the complete scores were issued on soundtrack albums. Franz Waxman received
many honors during his lifetime, including the Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of West Germany, honorary memberships in
the Mahler Society and the International Society of Arts and Letters, and an honorary doctorate of letters and humanities from
Columbia College. He died February 24, 1967, in Los Angeles at the age of 60.
Together with Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman a United States
postage stamp was issued in 1999. During the recent Waxman centenary a street in his birthplace was named Franz Waxmanstrasse.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and Turner Classic Movies held tributes. The Museum of Modern Art in New York
presented a 24 picture retrospective; this was the first time that MoMA honored a composer. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra
recently performed the complete score THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN live to film.
In May 1947, Franx Waxman organized, directed, and underwrote a series of concerts with the name “Beverly Hills Music Festival.”
By 1949, this venture was renamed the Los Angeles Music Festival and that year’s concerts were billed as the “third annual season.”
Officially, the Festival’s programs were sponsored by The Los Angeles Orchestral Society, which Waxman established specifically to
sponsor the concerts. Throughout the twenty-year history of the Festival, the musicians were drawn mainly from the local
professional community.
The Festival, sandwiched between the Philharmonic’s fall-spring season and the summer programs of the Hollywood Bowl, showed
from the start the stamp of Waxman’s interests and aesthetic goals. Waxman was one of the pioneers of the “mixed” program
that shed new light on familiar masterworks by setting them in the context of contemporary compositions. Reviewing the concert
of June 2, 1954, Los Angeles Daily News critic Mildred Norton wrote that the new season “continued the tradition now established
by the festival’s founder-director Franx Waxman� of offering unhackneyed and stimulating departures from the usual.” Although
he was part of the film industry, which is often (and wrongly) associated with conservative musical attitudes, Waxman was a
strong champion of contemporary music, as the concert programs clearly reveal. Even Mozart is outpaced by LA resident Stravinsky.
Arthur Honegger, for whom Waxman felt a particular affinity, is well represented, and among the most striking events of the
Festival’s history were the world premiere of Stravinsky’s Agon in 1957 and the West Coast premiere of Britten’s War Requiem,
under Waxman’s direction, that took place within two years of the work’s publication in 1962.
Beginning with the 1956 season CBS Radio selected concert performances from the Los Angeles Music Festival for broadcast
throughout the United States and overseas as part of their World Music Festivals. The Los Angeles Music Festival was included
among programs in Bergen (Norway), Helsinki (Finland), and Salzburg (Austria).
Reviews of Festival concerts — like those in other venues — routinely praise Waxman’s skill as a conductor: his clarity of gesture,
richness of expression, evidence of meticulous preparation, communication with the players, and shaping of the whole.
As early as its second year, the Festival concerts were mostly held on the UCLA campus, and gradually a close connection was
established to the School of Music. The 1961 festival was named the “First International Los Angeles Music Festival,” and on
June 6 UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall was the site for an “International Composers Conference” with a panel moderated by Roy Harris
and including Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Werner Egk, Lukas Foss, Blas Galindo, Iain Hamilton, Kara Karayev, Tikhon Khrennikov,
Milhaud, Piston, Rozsa, Stravinsky, John Vincent, Elinor Remick Warren, and Waxman himself. Two days later, an “International
Critics’ Symposium” was moderated by the Dean of USC’s School of Music, Raymond Kendall.
The 1962 festival, which listed Waxman as “founder and music director,” was also an “international festival” designed like the
previous year: four concerts with a “Symposium on the Arts” tucked in the middle. By 1963, the official name of the festival
became the “Los Angeles International Music Festival, “ but a year later the name reverted to “Los Angeles Music Festival” and
changed format to include two concerts and two recitals. The 1965 season included a cycle of all the Beethoven piano concertos
played by Rudolf Serkin, and the final season (1966) returned to a format used twice earlier: three orchestral concerts and another
of concert jazz compositions. It is both touching and appropriate that the last composition performed in the Festival series was
Waxman’s own orchestral song cycle, The Song of Terezin.
Music Composed by
Franz Waxman
Played by the
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin
With the
Rundfunkchor Berlin
Conducted by
Elmer Bernstein
"If Elmer Bernstein had realized his childhood hopes, he might have been a successful concert pianist from the '40s through the '60s.
Instead, thanks to his ability as a composer (manifested at an early age), and the timely intervention of World War II, he has for more
than four decades been a major force in popular and film music, and a major influence on American popular culture.
Born in New York City, Bernstein as a boy showed a consuming interest in music, especially on the piano. He was a natural prodigy and
early on, his teacher recognized a tendency on his part to improvise on the piece he was playing, an ability that he was encouraged
to develop. Bernstein also had a serious interest in folk music, which was to serve him in good stead in the decades that followed.
When Bernstein was 13, his music teacher arranged for the boy to audition for Aaron Copland, who was sufficiently impressed to
arrange for him to study with one of his own students. He subsequently enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York, where he continued
as a piano student and also took up composition. His composition teachers in the late '30s included Stefan Wolpe and Roger Sessions.
World War II interrupted any plans that Bernstein might have had to pursue a career in the concert hall. Luckily, he was assigned to
an entertainment unit after being drafted and it was while serving in uniform that he got his first formal opportunity to write music.
He was assigned as an arranger of traditional American songs for Glenn Miller and the United States Army Air Force Band, which led
to his being assigned to write the music for Armed Forces Radio programs. By the time he returned to civilian life, Bernstein had written
the music for more than 80 broadcasts and wanted to pursue a career as a composer. The post-war era offered ever-decreasing
opportunities for composers, as entertainment and music were changing (and no one was sure how, or into what).
In 1949, he got a new chance to write music when he was commissioned to write the score for a United Nation radio program on
the founding of the State of Israel. Radio was still a huge medium in those days and the dominant home entertainment medium, and
the broadcast was also carried by NBC. One network executive who heard it was impressed with Bernstein's music and offered him
the chance to compose the music for a network program. That program, in turn, led to an offer -- increasingly rare in that time of
ever-tightening budgets and personnel lists -- to come out to Hollywood and work in movies. Bernstein arrived in Hollywood just as
the studio system was entering a period of decline (and ultimate collapse), in the wake of the birth of commercial television and the
consent decree signed by the studios that forced them to give up their theater chains. Still, there was work available and he spent
the early '50s moving between the smaller major studios like RKO and Columbia and independent companies such as Astor Films.
It was at Astor that Bernstein scored two of his stranger film vehicles, the notoriously bad (though campily funny) Robot Monster
and Cat Women of the Moon.
He gradually moved up to doing films at the majors, including MGM and 20th Century Fox, where he got to write the music for
some of their smaller-scale films. Bernstein's professional breakthrough took place in 1955 with Otto Preminger's film The Man
With the Golden Arm. The movie itself was a breakthrough in terms of subject matter (drug addiction) and the fact that the lead
character (played by Frank Sinatra) was a jazz musician, and it opened up possibilities that weren't often found in Hollywood
features. Bernstein used jazz as the basis of his score for the film, and the result was a groundbreaking soundtrack that became
the first of Bernstein's film music to get a commercial release -- it also received an Oscar nomination, the first of many for
the composer.
His score for the Preminger film made a noise among musicians and the somewhat more adventurous portion of the audience
for popular music, but that same year, Bernstein was assigned to a film with far wider, more mainstream, appeal: Cecil B. DeMille's
The Ten Commandments. A religious epic that pulled whole families into theaters and found a major audience in every corner of
the country and almost every social stratum, the movie was a monumental hit. Bernstein's big orchestral score achieved great
popularity and the composer's name was suddenly known and recognized among casual filmgoers in the same manner as his
much older contemporaries Max Steiner and Franz Waxman.
In 1958, Bernstein moved into a new and booming field of music composition -- television -- signing with Revue Productions,
the television arm of Universal Pictures. For the next few years, he turned up as the composer of the main title music of series
such as the detective thriller Johnny Staccato (which was a Top Five hit in England) and Riverboat, among other shows. He also
cut a pair of light pop-jazz albums, one for Decca and the other for Capitol, in 1956 and 1960, respectively.
The next major milestone in Bernstein's career came in 1960 when he was engaged to score John Sturges' The Magnificent
Seven. A Western adapted from Akira Kurosawa's medieval Japanese epic The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven proved
phenomenally popular, not only in the year of its release but perennially so. It had enough action and richness of characterization
that audiences loved to come back to it year after year on television. It was with the score of The Magnificent Seven that Bernstein
got to put his early love of folk music into play. In a manner not far removed from Aaron Copland (or, for that matter, film
composer Alfred Newman), he utilized the melodic characteristics of folk and Western music in a sweeping orchestral canvas
that gave the action on the screen the veneer of folk-legend and the urgency of a great symphony in performance.
In fact, the main title theme proved so rousing that it quickly took on a life of its own. Starting in the early '60s, The Magnificent
Seven theme was licensed by the makers of Marlboro cigarettes for use in a series of Western-themed commercials (replacing
a much more non-descript working man image previously used in their television ads) that ran for the remainder of the decade
and right up until the end of legal cigarette advertising on television. In the end, it may have become the most widely heard piece
of movie music in history, allowing for the hundreds of thousands of airings of dozens of commercials for the cigarettes, all of
which used at least a fragment of Bernstein's music.
Ironically, the company that released the movie never capitalized on the music's popularity, and until 1999, there was no original
soundtrack album for The Magnificent Seven. At the time of the film's release, Bernstein wasn't well-known for his Western theme
music. That soon changed, but not in time for United Artists Records to do much about it. Additionally, United Artists Records was
a new operation, only a couple of years old, and had not done particularly well with the Western soundtracks it had released up to
that point, some of it very good and attached to even higher profile productions than The Magnificent Seven. By the time the
music's popularity was achieved and recognized a year or so after the release of the movie, the assumption was that it was too
late to capitalize on it by belatedly issuing an album, especially since one hadn't been prepared from the original film recordings.
After The Magnificent Seven, Bernstein's career was made, although he took great pains to see to it that he got other projects
besides more Westerns. Bernstein's work during the '60s ranged from delicate, sensitive dramas like To Kill a Mockingbird, to such
rousing adventure yarns as The Great Escape. The latter project was not surprising since it was an action-adventure film by the
same director and featuring three of the same stars as The Magnificent Seven and resembled his score to the earlier Sturges
movie and this time there was an album. His music for The Sons of Katie Elder featured a title theme very similar to his forgotten
main title theme from the series Riverboat, but also a background accompaniment to an elegiac reading about the title character
by John Wayne, and included a song by Johnny Cash. And his work as music director on Thoroughly Modern Millie, a musical
and spoof starring Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore, won Bernstein his only Oscar to date.
Having come up during the tail end of the studio system, Bernstein had come to know many of his older musical colleagues,
both personally and through their work, and such was his success that he was able to do something on their behalf at the
beginning of the '70s. He formed his own record label, Filmusic Collection, and used it to release a series of self-financed
recordings of scores that weren't otherwise available, including Miklos Rozsa's music for The Thief of Baghdad, Bernard
Herrmann's unused score for Torn Curtain, and a more complete version of his own To Kill a Mockingbird score than had
ever been available. The '70s also saw a decline in the kind of big-budget film within which Bernstein's music seemed to
work best. He did some television work, including the title music for the series The Rookies.
In 1977, he was thrust into composing for a wholly new idiom of filmmaking when he was asked by director John Landis
to score the comedy Animal House. Bernstein had written the music for every kind of movie, from Westerns to science fiction,
but had never scored a comedy. He hesitated, but Landis said that he wanted Bernstein to do exactly what he always did
in scoring and, in fact, wanted the kind of big-theme, big-sound scoring that he was known for. As it turned out, the mix of
his dignified music underscoring the film's physical comedy lent a deeper veneer of humor to the movie, making it seem
even more satirical. Animal House was a huge success and opened up a whole new class and variety of film to Bernstein's
talents. Over the next few years, he wrote the music for such comedies as Airplane, Stripes, Ghostbusters,
and Three Amigos!
At the same time, his status as the dean of living soundtrack composers opened up serious dramas and the works of
major filmmakers to him in ways that they hadn't been since the '60s; there weren't too many serious, big-budget
movies being made, but any producer or director who wanted a score that matched the opulence of what they saw
on the screen had to look to Elmer Bernstein. He was chosen by Martin Scorsese to score his remake of the 1960
thriller Cape Fear, for which he did a rescoring of Bernard Herrmann's original music; he also wrote new music for
Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. Bernstein also wrote the music to such high-profile films as Jim Sheridan's The Field
and Stephen Frears' ,The Grifters.
At the outset of the 21st century, Elmer Bernstein remained very busy as a composer, conductor and arranger, and
he continued to devote his energy to the restoration of old film scores, making new commercial recordings of his
own early works and those of other composers. He was also busy as a conductor and arranger on various commercial
recordings that required his skills at coaxing a lush yet exciting sound from an orchestra. Bernstein died in his sleep on
August 18, 2004 at the age of 82."
Source: RCA/BMG "100 Years of Film Music" CD, 1996 (My rip!)
Quality: FLAC 16-44 (image + cue + log, incl. complete artwork & booklet)
File Size: 337 MB
All albums in the RCA "100 Years of Film Music" Series
Film Noir: Concert Suites of Music by Adolph Deutsch, Franz Waxman, Frederick Hollander & Max Steiner - Thread 211261
Im Kampf mit dem Berge (In Sturm und Eis): A Silent Film Score by Paul Hindemith - Thread 210588
The Lubitsch Touch: Music for Silent Films by Karl-Ernst Sasse - Thread 211542
High Noon: The Film Music of Dimitri Tiomkin - Thread 211329
Charles Chaplin: The Film Music, conducted by Carl Davis - Thread 212562
Metropolis: The Gottfried Huppertz Score* - Thread 211429
Sergei Prokofiev: Ivan the Terrible (arr. Stasevich) - Thread 212697
Paul Dessau: Music for the Alice Comedies & The Magic Clock - Thread 212649
Winfried Zillig: Panamericana (Traumstrasse der Welt), 2 CDs - Thread 212135
Franz Waxman: Sayonara, Hemingway's Adventures, A Place in the Sun, Taras Bulba - Thread 211974
Max Steiner: The Adventures of Mark Twain - E.W. Korngold: The Prince and the Pauper - Thread 211090
Charles Koechlin: The Seven Stars Symphony, etc - Thread 212997
and contributed by user tri2061990:
Hans Erdmann: Nosferatu (The Silent Film Score) - Thread 164859
alternatively, my own:
Hans Erdmann: Nosferatu - The Complete Score (BD to FLAC rip) - Thread 211967
* never released: This is based on my rip of the then-complete film on DVD.
Please request the FLAC link (including the complete
artwork, LOG & CUE files (EAC accurate rip)) in this thread. PMs will be ignored!
This is my own rip. Please do not share my material further, also please
add to my reputation!
Please request the FLAC link (including the complete
artwork, LOG & CUE files (EAC accurate rip)) in this thread. PMs will be ignored!
This is my own rip. Please do not share my material further, also please
add to my reputation!
Franz Waxman led a variety of musical lives as composer, conductor and impresario. He was born in Konigshutte, Upper Silesia,
Germany, on December 24, 1906, and was the youngest of six children. No one in the family was musical except Franz, who started
piano lessons at the age of seven. His father was an industrialist, and not believing his son could earn a living in music, encouraged him
in a banking career. He worked for two and a half years as a teller and used his salary to pay for lessons in piano, harmony and composition.
He then quit the bank and moved to Dresden and then to Berlin to study music.
During this period he paid for his musical education by playing piano in nightclubs and with the Weintraub Syncopaters, a popular jazz band
of the late 1920s. While with the band he began to do their arrangements, and this led to orchestrating some early German musical films.
Frederick Hollander, who had written some music for the Weintraubs, gave Waxman his first important movie assignment: orchestrating
and conducting Hollander’s score for Josef von Sternberg’s classic film, “The Blue Angel.” The film’s producer, Erich Pommer, who was also
head of the UFA Studios in Berlin, was so pleased with the orchestration of the score that he gave Waxman his first major composing
assignment: Fritz Lang’s version of “Liliom” (1933) which was filmed in Paris after their exodus from Germany. Pommer’s next assignment,
Jerome Kern’s “Music in the Air” (Fox Films, 1934), took him to the United States, and he brought Waxman with him to arrange the music.
Waxman’s first original Hollywood score was James Whale’s “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935), which led to a two-year contract with
Universal as head of the music department. He scored a dozen of the more than 50 Universal films on which he worked as music director.
Among the best known are “Magnificent Obsession, “Diamond Jim” and “The Invisible Ray.”
Two years after he went to Hollywood, Waxman, then 30, signed a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to compose.
He averaged about seven pictures a year, and it was during this period that he scored such famous Spencer Tracy films as “Captains
Courageous,” “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and “Woman of the Year.” In 1937, he was loaned by M-G-M to David O. Selznick for
“The Young at Heart” and was nominated for both Best Original Music and Best Score – the first two of 12 Academy Award nominations
he was to receive for the 144 films he scored in his 32 years in Hollywood. In 1940 he was again loaned to Selznick, this time for
“Rebecca,” and was nominated for his third Academy Award.
Waxman left M-G-M in 1943 and began a long association with Warner Brothers. “Old Acquaintance” is from this period. (Selections
from three more of his Warner Brothers scores can be heard on RCA albums: “Mr. Skeffington” is included in “Classic Film Scores for
Bette Davis,” “To Have and Have Not,” and “The Two Mrs. Carrolls” are included in “Casablanca – Classic Film Scores for Humphrey Bogart,
and “Objective, Burma!” are on “Captive Blood” – Classic Film Scores for Errol Flynn)
In 1947 Waxman founded the Los Angeles International Music Festival, which he was to head for 20 years. World and American
premieres of 80 major works by composers such as Stravinsky, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovitch and Schoenberg were
given at the festival.
By 1947 Waxman had a busy schedule indeed. In addition to devoting a great deal of time to the festival, he was in demand at all the
major studios, was guest conducting symphony orchestras in Europe as well as in the United States and was composing concert music.
For the film “Humoresque” he wrote a special piece based on themes from Bizet’s “Carmen,” which was played by Isaac Stern on the
soundtrack. The “Carmen Fantasie” has become standard repertoire and was recorded by Jascha Heifetz for RCA. Among Waxman’s
other concert works are “Overture for Trumpet and Orchestra,” based on themes from “The Horn Blows at Midnight;” “Sinfonietta for
String Orchestra and Timpani;” a dramatic song cycle “The Song of Terezin,” and an oratorio, “Joshua.”
Waxman won the Academy Award in 1950 for Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” and in 1951 for George Stevens’ “A Place in the Sun.”
For over half a century, he was the only composer to have won the award for Best Score in two successive years. It was during the
‘50s and ‘60s that he composed some of his most important and varied scores. These are represented by the above two Academy
Award winners as well as by “Prince Valiant” and “Taras Bulba.” He had usually been associated with romantic films, but now he
progressed to epic and jazz-oriented scores. “Crime in the Streets,” “The Spirit of St. Louis,” “Sayonara,” “Peyton Place” and
“The Nun’s Story” are also from this period and the complete scores were issued on soundtrack albums. Franz Waxman received
many honors during his lifetime, including the Cross of Merit from the Federal Republic of West Germany, honorary memberships in
the Mahler Society and the International Society of Arts and Letters, and an honorary doctorate of letters and humanities from
Columbia College. He died February 24, 1967, in Los Angeles at the age of 60.
Together with Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann and Alfred Newman a United States
postage stamp was issued in 1999. During the recent Waxman centenary a street in his birthplace was named Franz Waxmanstrasse.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and Turner Classic Movies held tributes. The Museum of Modern Art in New York
presented a 24 picture retrospective; this was the first time that MoMA honored a composer. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra
recently performed the complete score THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN live to film.
In May 1947, Franx Waxman organized, directed, and underwrote a series of concerts with the name “Beverly Hills Music Festival.”
By 1949, this venture was renamed the Los Angeles Music Festival and that year’s concerts were billed as the “third annual season.”
Officially, the Festival’s programs were sponsored by The Los Angeles Orchestral Society, which Waxman established specifically to
sponsor the concerts. Throughout the twenty-year history of the Festival, the musicians were drawn mainly from the local
professional community.
The Festival, sandwiched between the Philharmonic’s fall-spring season and the summer programs of the Hollywood Bowl, showed
from the start the stamp of Waxman’s interests and aesthetic goals. Waxman was one of the pioneers of the “mixed” program
that shed new light on familiar masterworks by setting them in the context of contemporary compositions. Reviewing the concert
of June 2, 1954, Los Angeles Daily News critic Mildred Norton wrote that the new season “continued the tradition now established
by the festival’s founder-director Franx Waxman� of offering unhackneyed and stimulating departures from the usual.” Although
he was part of the film industry, which is often (and wrongly) associated with conservative musical attitudes, Waxman was a
strong champion of contemporary music, as the concert programs clearly reveal. Even Mozart is outpaced by LA resident Stravinsky.
Arthur Honegger, for whom Waxman felt a particular affinity, is well represented, and among the most striking events of the
Festival’s history were the world premiere of Stravinsky’s Agon in 1957 and the West Coast premiere of Britten’s War Requiem,
under Waxman’s direction, that took place within two years of the work’s publication in 1962.
Beginning with the 1956 season CBS Radio selected concert performances from the Los Angeles Music Festival for broadcast
throughout the United States and overseas as part of their World Music Festivals. The Los Angeles Music Festival was included
among programs in Bergen (Norway), Helsinki (Finland), and Salzburg (Austria).
Reviews of Festival concerts — like those in other venues — routinely praise Waxman’s skill as a conductor: his clarity of gesture,
richness of expression, evidence of meticulous preparation, communication with the players, and shaping of the whole.
As early as its second year, the Festival concerts were mostly held on the UCLA campus, and gradually a close connection was
established to the School of Music. The 1961 festival was named the “First International Los Angeles Music Festival,” and on
June 6 UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall was the site for an “International Composers Conference” with a panel moderated by Roy Harris
and including Karl-Birger Blomdahl, Werner Egk, Lukas Foss, Blas Galindo, Iain Hamilton, Kara Karayev, Tikhon Khrennikov,
Milhaud, Piston, Rozsa, Stravinsky, John Vincent, Elinor Remick Warren, and Waxman himself. Two days later, an “International
Critics’ Symposium” was moderated by the Dean of USC’s School of Music, Raymond Kendall.
The 1962 festival, which listed Waxman as “founder and music director,” was also an “international festival” designed like the
previous year: four concerts with a “Symposium on the Arts” tucked in the middle. By 1963, the official name of the festival
became the “Los Angeles International Music Festival, “ but a year later the name reverted to “Los Angeles Music Festival” and
changed format to include two concerts and two recitals. The 1965 season included a cycle of all the Beethoven piano concertos
played by Rudolf Serkin, and the final season (1966) returned to a format used twice earlier: three orchestral concerts and another
of concert jazz compositions. It is both touching and appropriate that the last composition performed in the Festival series was
Waxman’s own orchestral song cycle, The Song of Terezin.
Music Composed by
Franz Waxman
Played by the
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin
With the
Rundfunkchor Berlin
Conducted by
Elmer Bernstein
"If Elmer Bernstein had realized his childhood hopes, he might have been a successful concert pianist from the '40s through the '60s.
Instead, thanks to his ability as a composer (manifested at an early age), and the timely intervention of World War II, he has for more
than four decades been a major force in popular and film music, and a major influence on American popular culture.
Born in New York City, Bernstein as a boy showed a consuming interest in music, especially on the piano. He was a natural prodigy and
early on, his teacher recognized a tendency on his part to improvise on the piece he was playing, an ability that he was encouraged
to develop. Bernstein also had a serious interest in folk music, which was to serve him in good stead in the decades that followed.
When Bernstein was 13, his music teacher arranged for the boy to audition for Aaron Copland, who was sufficiently impressed to
arrange for him to study with one of his own students. He subsequently enrolled at the Juilliard School in New York, where he continued
as a piano student and also took up composition. His composition teachers in the late '30s included Stefan Wolpe and Roger Sessions.
World War II interrupted any plans that Bernstein might have had to pursue a career in the concert hall. Luckily, he was assigned to
an entertainment unit after being drafted and it was while serving in uniform that he got his first formal opportunity to write music.
He was assigned as an arranger of traditional American songs for Glenn Miller and the United States Army Air Force Band, which led
to his being assigned to write the music for Armed Forces Radio programs. By the time he returned to civilian life, Bernstein had written
the music for more than 80 broadcasts and wanted to pursue a career as a composer. The post-war era offered ever-decreasing
opportunities for composers, as entertainment and music were changing (and no one was sure how, or into what).
In 1949, he got a new chance to write music when he was commissioned to write the score for a United Nation radio program on
the founding of the State of Israel. Radio was still a huge medium in those days and the dominant home entertainment medium, and
the broadcast was also carried by NBC. One network executive who heard it was impressed with Bernstein's music and offered him
the chance to compose the music for a network program. That program, in turn, led to an offer -- increasingly rare in that time of
ever-tightening budgets and personnel lists -- to come out to Hollywood and work in movies. Bernstein arrived in Hollywood just as
the studio system was entering a period of decline (and ultimate collapse), in the wake of the birth of commercial television and the
consent decree signed by the studios that forced them to give up their theater chains. Still, there was work available and he spent
the early '50s moving between the smaller major studios like RKO and Columbia and independent companies such as Astor Films.
It was at Astor that Bernstein scored two of his stranger film vehicles, the notoriously bad (though campily funny) Robot Monster
and Cat Women of the Moon.
He gradually moved up to doing films at the majors, including MGM and 20th Century Fox, where he got to write the music for
some of their smaller-scale films. Bernstein's professional breakthrough took place in 1955 with Otto Preminger's film The Man
With the Golden Arm. The movie itself was a breakthrough in terms of subject matter (drug addiction) and the fact that the lead
character (played by Frank Sinatra) was a jazz musician, and it opened up possibilities that weren't often found in Hollywood
features. Bernstein used jazz as the basis of his score for the film, and the result was a groundbreaking soundtrack that became
the first of Bernstein's film music to get a commercial release -- it also received an Oscar nomination, the first of many for
the composer.
His score for the Preminger film made a noise among musicians and the somewhat more adventurous portion of the audience
for popular music, but that same year, Bernstein was assigned to a film with far wider, more mainstream, appeal: Cecil B. DeMille's
The Ten Commandments. A religious epic that pulled whole families into theaters and found a major audience in every corner of
the country and almost every social stratum, the movie was a monumental hit. Bernstein's big orchestral score achieved great
popularity and the composer's name was suddenly known and recognized among casual filmgoers in the same manner as his
much older contemporaries Max Steiner and Franz Waxman.
In 1958, Bernstein moved into a new and booming field of music composition -- television -- signing with Revue Productions,
the television arm of Universal Pictures. For the next few years, he turned up as the composer of the main title music of series
such as the detective thriller Johnny Staccato (which was a Top Five hit in England) and Riverboat, among other shows. He also
cut a pair of light pop-jazz albums, one for Decca and the other for Capitol, in 1956 and 1960, respectively.
The next major milestone in Bernstein's career came in 1960 when he was engaged to score John Sturges' The Magnificent
Seven. A Western adapted from Akira Kurosawa's medieval Japanese epic The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven proved
phenomenally popular, not only in the year of its release but perennially so. It had enough action and richness of characterization
that audiences loved to come back to it year after year on television. It was with the score of The Magnificent Seven that Bernstein
got to put his early love of folk music into play. In a manner not far removed from Aaron Copland (or, for that matter, film
composer Alfred Newman), he utilized the melodic characteristics of folk and Western music in a sweeping orchestral canvas
that gave the action on the screen the veneer of folk-legend and the urgency of a great symphony in performance.
In fact, the main title theme proved so rousing that it quickly took on a life of its own. Starting in the early '60s, The Magnificent
Seven theme was licensed by the makers of Marlboro cigarettes for use in a series of Western-themed commercials (replacing
a much more non-descript working man image previously used in their television ads) that ran for the remainder of the decade
and right up until the end of legal cigarette advertising on television. In the end, it may have become the most widely heard piece
of movie music in history, allowing for the hundreds of thousands of airings of dozens of commercials for the cigarettes, all of
which used at least a fragment of Bernstein's music.
Ironically, the company that released the movie never capitalized on the music's popularity, and until 1999, there was no original
soundtrack album for The Magnificent Seven. At the time of the film's release, Bernstein wasn't well-known for his Western theme
music. That soon changed, but not in time for United Artists Records to do much about it. Additionally, United Artists Records was
a new operation, only a couple of years old, and had not done particularly well with the Western soundtracks it had released up to
that point, some of it very good and attached to even higher profile productions than The Magnificent Seven. By the time the
music's popularity was achieved and recognized a year or so after the release of the movie, the assumption was that it was too
late to capitalize on it by belatedly issuing an album, especially since one hadn't been prepared from the original film recordings.
After The Magnificent Seven, Bernstein's career was made, although he took great pains to see to it that he got other projects
besides more Westerns. Bernstein's work during the '60s ranged from delicate, sensitive dramas like To Kill a Mockingbird, to such
rousing adventure yarns as The Great Escape. The latter project was not surprising since it was an action-adventure film by the
same director and featuring three of the same stars as The Magnificent Seven and resembled his score to the earlier Sturges
movie and this time there was an album. His music for The Sons of Katie Elder featured a title theme very similar to his forgotten
main title theme from the series Riverboat, but also a background accompaniment to an elegiac reading about the title character
by John Wayne, and included a song by Johnny Cash. And his work as music director on Thoroughly Modern Millie, a musical
and spoof starring Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore, won Bernstein his only Oscar to date.
Having come up during the tail end of the studio system, Bernstein had come to know many of his older musical colleagues,
both personally and through their work, and such was his success that he was able to do something on their behalf at the
beginning of the '70s. He formed his own record label, Filmusic Collection, and used it to release a series of self-financed
recordings of scores that weren't otherwise available, including Miklos Rozsa's music for The Thief of Baghdad, Bernard
Herrmann's unused score for Torn Curtain, and a more complete version of his own To Kill a Mockingbird score than had
ever been available. The '70s also saw a decline in the kind of big-budget film within which Bernstein's music seemed to
work best. He did some television work, including the title music for the series The Rookies.
In 1977, he was thrust into composing for a wholly new idiom of filmmaking when he was asked by director John Landis
to score the comedy Animal House. Bernstein had written the music for every kind of movie, from Westerns to science fiction,
but had never scored a comedy. He hesitated, but Landis said that he wanted Bernstein to do exactly what he always did
in scoring and, in fact, wanted the kind of big-theme, big-sound scoring that he was known for. As it turned out, the mix of
his dignified music underscoring the film's physical comedy lent a deeper veneer of humor to the movie, making it seem
even more satirical. Animal House was a huge success and opened up a whole new class and variety of film to Bernstein's
talents. Over the next few years, he wrote the music for such comedies as Airplane, Stripes, Ghostbusters,
and Three Amigos!
At the same time, his status as the dean of living soundtrack composers opened up serious dramas and the works of
major filmmakers to him in ways that they hadn't been since the '60s; there weren't too many serious, big-budget
movies being made, but any producer or director who wanted a score that matched the opulence of what they saw
on the screen had to look to Elmer Bernstein. He was chosen by Martin Scorsese to score his remake of the 1960
thriller Cape Fear, for which he did a rescoring of Bernard Herrmann's original music; he also wrote new music for
Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. Bernstein also wrote the music to such high-profile films as Jim Sheridan's The Field
and Stephen Frears' ,The Grifters.
At the outset of the 21st century, Elmer Bernstein remained very busy as a composer, conductor and arranger, and
he continued to devote his energy to the restoration of old film scores, making new commercial recordings of his
own early works and those of other composers. He was also busy as a conductor and arranger on various commercial
recordings that required his skills at coaxing a lush yet exciting sound from an orchestra. Bernstein died in his sleep on
August 18, 2004 at the age of 82."
Source: RCA/BMG "100 Years of Film Music" CD, 1996 (My rip!)
Quality: FLAC 16-44 (image + cue + log, incl. complete artwork & booklet)
File Size: 337 MB
All albums in the RCA "100 Years of Film Music" Series
Film Noir: Concert Suites of Music by Adolph Deutsch, Franz Waxman, Frederick Hollander & Max Steiner - Thread 211261
Im Kampf mit dem Berge (In Sturm und Eis): A Silent Film Score by Paul Hindemith - Thread 210588
The Lubitsch Touch: Music for Silent Films by Karl-Ernst Sasse - Thread 211542
High Noon: The Film Music of Dimitri Tiomkin - Thread 211329
Charles Chaplin: The Film Music, conducted by Carl Davis - Thread 212562
Metropolis: The Gottfried Huppertz Score* - Thread 211429
Sergei Prokofiev: Ivan the Terrible (arr. Stasevich) - Thread 212697
Paul Dessau: Music for the Alice Comedies & The Magic Clock - Thread 212649
Winfried Zillig: Panamericana (Traumstrasse der Welt), 2 CDs - Thread 212135
Franz Waxman: Sayonara, Hemingway's Adventures, A Place in the Sun, Taras Bulba - Thread 211974
Max Steiner: The Adventures of Mark Twain - E.W. Korngold: The Prince and the Pauper - Thread 211090
Charles Koechlin: The Seven Stars Symphony, etc - Thread 212997
and contributed by user tri2061990:
Hans Erdmann: Nosferatu (The Silent Film Score) - Thread 164859
alternatively, my own:
Hans Erdmann: Nosferatu - The Complete Score (BD to FLAC rip) - Thread 211967
* never released: This is based on my rip of the then-complete film on DVD.
Please request the FLAC link (including the complete
artwork, LOG & CUE files (EAC accurate rip)) in this thread. PMs will be ignored!
This is my own rip. Please do not share my material further, also please
add to my reputation!