Hungarian-born composer Miklos Rósza became among the most successful of the Europeans who lent their talents to Hollywood cinema, scoring Ben-Hur among many other familiar films. His concert works are somewhat less numerous than his more than 100 film scores, and few would even claim the two works recorded here as the finest examples among those. Yet they're uncommon pieces that hold plenty of interest for fans of this composer. The Concerto for viola and orchestra, Op. 37, and Hungarian Serenade, Op. 25, represent ...
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Hungarian-born composer Miklos Rósza became among the most successful of the Europeans who lent their talents to Hollywood cinema, scoring Ben-Hur among many other familiar films. His concert works are somewhat less numerous than his more than 100 film scores, and few would even claim the two works recorded here as the finest examples among those. Yet they're uncommon pieces that hold plenty of interest for fans of this composer. The Concerto for viola and orchestra, Op. 37, and Hungarian Serenade, Op. 25, represent respectively the end and the beginning of Rósza's compositional career; the Hungarian Serenade, though it reached its final form in 1952, was the product of a series of revisions of much earlier music. The Hungarian quality emphasized by annotator Frank K. DeWald is more in evidence in the serenade's shorter movements than in the viola concerto, and both pieces are in a late Romantic language distinguished by degree of dissonance, but not by a fundamental difference in style from the...
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