CD REVIEW – THE GOLDEN AGE OF HOLLYWOOD
CONCERT WORKS FOR VIOLIN AND PIANO
PATRICK SAVAGE & MARTIN COUSIN
quartz QTZ 2156 [62’36]

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This is an interesting release not quite what you might expect from the main title. The only thing it has to do with Hollywood is to feature works by composers well-known for their association with movie music in Los Angeles's Tinseltown from the 1920s to the 1960s.

Austrian-born, Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957), one of the most talented of the refugee composers who ended up writing for films, is no stranger to these pages. His work that opens this album was written in 1920 for a production in Vienna of Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing'.

He is followed by Franz Waxman (1906-1967), German-born of Jewish descent, who was forced by what the Nazi's were doing to flee to France and then to the United States. In 1948 he wrote the delightfully happy 'Four Scenes of Childhood' for his friend, Jascha Heifetz, on the birth on his son.

Robert Russell Bennett (1894-1981), born in Kansas City, arranged Broadway shows and film scores for over 40 years. His contribution, from 1940, is the jazz-inspired 'Hexapoda: Five Studies in Jitteroptera', which was premiered to acclamation by the aforementioned great violinist.

The next three works are all first recordings. A previously unknown name to your reviewer is Heinz Roemheld (1901-85), born in Milwaukee to German parents, he wrote 'Sonatina for Violin and Piano', a high-spirited piece with a very fast last movement, in 1950. A native of Brooklyn, Jerome Moross (1913-83) composed the classic 'The Big Country' Theme and included here is his 1941 'Recitative and Aria for Violin and Piano', with its suggested echoes of the Mid-West. His friend since they were teenagers, Bernard Herrman (1911-75), was also born into an émigré Russian Jewish family. He is, of course, celebrated for his collaborations with film director Alfred Hitchcock. His 'Pastorale (Twilight)' was composed in 1929, more than a decade before his first film score for 'Citizen Kane'.

In the same year, Miklós Rózsa (1907-95), a Hungarian-American and the composer of the scores for 'Ben-Hur' and other film spectaculars, wrote 'Variations on a Hungarian Peasant Song' and it is a suitably virtuosic piece on which to end this fascinating album of musical discoveries.

Violinist Patrick Savage has also written some very good liner notes, together with colour photos and pen pictures of the two praiseworthy participants.

© Peter Burt, May 2024