Erich Wolfgang Korngold was not so much a Hollywood film composer as a Viennese classical composer who happened to find himself exiled from his home for a decade during the Nazi era and World War II, and spent his time writing one or two scores a year for Warner Bros., then went back home after the war ended. That was also about the time that the soundtrack album began to come into vogue, so Korngold's work was not preserved on LPs. Conductor Charles Gerhardt and his National Philharmonic Orchestra, as part of their Classic ...
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Erich Wolfgang Korngold was not so much a Hollywood film composer as a Viennese classical composer who happened to find himself exiled from his home for a decade during the Nazi era and World War II, and spent his time writing one or two scores a year for Warner Bros., then went back home after the war ended. That was also about the time that the soundtrack album began to come into vogue, so Korngold's work was not preserved on LPs. Conductor Charles Gerhardt and his National Philharmonic Orchestra, as part of their Classic Film Scores series, somewhat make up for that lack with this album (the first of two devoted to the composer), which contains excerpts -- in Hugo Friedhofer's original orchestrations -- from 12 of Korngold's scores (representing more than half his total output). These include highlights from the Academy Award-winning music for Anthony Adverse and The Adventures of Robin Hood and the Academy Award-nominated music for The Sea Hawk . Korngold's music was written for swashbuckling Errol Flynn features and historical dramas, which allowed him to use a lavish orchestral style that sometimes swamped the films themselves. ( Anthony Adverse is a good example.) He is the epitome of a composer who imposes his own style on the films he scores, and is not at all subservient to them. The result is some powerful, original music more suggestive of the romantic classical style than anything else. Gerhardt and the orchestra effectively re-create the composer's heyday. ~ William Ruhlmann, Rovi
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