There is an old saw to the effect that, if you demonstrate a facility at something, people will ask you to do that one thing over and over until you show you can do something else. That applies to the film scoring career of Hungarian-American composer Miklós Rózsa, who was still active on an occasional basis in the mid-'70s, when this album of re-recorded excerpts from his work was released, although his prime period dated from the mid-'30s to the early '60s. Early on, especially in his work with Alexander Korda, Rózsa ...
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There is an old saw to the effect that, if you demonstrate a facility at something, people will ask you to do that one thing over and over until you show you can do something else. That applies to the film scoring career of Hungarian-American composer Miklós Rózsa, who was still active on an occasional basis in the mid-'70s, when this album of re-recorded excerpts from his work was released, although his prime period dated from the mid-'30s to the early '60s. Early on, especially in his work with Alexander Korda, Rózsa seemed to have an affinity for fantasies set in exotic places, such as the Academy Award-nominated The Thief of Bagdad (1940). By 1944, when he got another Oscar nomination for Double Indemnity, he had become the go-to guy for film noir, leading to his first Academy Award for Spellbound (1945). Then, after he moved to MGM in the late '40s, his métier became the historical epic with Quo Vadis (1951). Conductor Charles Gerhardt, leading his National Philharmonic Orchestra in cues drawn from a range of Rózsa's scores, wisely mixes things up, giving a good sense of the composer's true range. The rousing adventure stuff is there in pieces from Knights of the Round Table and The Four Feathers, along with the darkly romantic themes of Spellbound, The Lost Weekend, and Double Indemnity, plus at least a little of the epics with Ivanhoe. Gerhardt may be a bit too enamored of The Red House (1947), devoting five tracks to it. But he manages to suggest the sweep of the composer's work over a long career just winding down. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi
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