I was never a devotee
of so-called "classic" films, so it
was through RCA's "Classic Film Scores"
series on LP that I first got to know
the work of the great Hollywood composers.
At the time, Max Steiner's music struck
me as studied and self-conscious alongside,
say, Erich Wolfgang Korngold's full-blooded
Straussiana. But that was thirty
years ago. This fresh, vivid new recording
of Steiner's score for The Adventures
of Mark Twain - which received an
Academy Award nomination, though the
tribulations of World War II disrupted
the film's release - underlines what
we're missing nowadays, when "film scores"
are either electronic constructions
or chart-conscious pop and rock anthologies.
How ironic that, while the grandeur
and textural richness of the "Golden
Age" scores could emerge only dimly
in monaural sound, today's surround-sound
equipment is wasted on synthesizers
and booming rock beats.
For this presentation,
film music composer and scholar John
Morgan has credibly woven the incidental
tracks into a continuous seventy-minute
concert suite - presumably the "score
reconstruction" with which he is credited
here. The notes don't suggest anything
like the efforts undertaken for the
Chandos "British Film Music" series,
where the music had literally to be
reconstructed from the film soundtracks
because the scores were lost or destroyed.
The result is quite credible, actually
making use of the repetition of motifs
to suggest a sort of development.
The music itself is
eminently listenable, attractive in
a workmanlike rather than an inspired
way. Steiner conjures a sort of generic
"Americana" from devices like the pentatonic
scale (in the title theme, which rather
quickly wears out its welcome) and cakewalk
syncopations (track 16, "More Squirrels"),
and isn't above exploiting familiar
melodies for their associations: "Clementine"
for the California Gold Rush (track
8) - sounding, amazingly, neither trivial
nor pretentious - the "Battle Hymn of
the Republic" when General Grant shows
up (track 21), "Rule Britannia" in full
orchestral panoply for Oxford University
(track 27). Despite the occasional representational
detail - the pitched woodblocks for
the "Buggy Ride" (track 19) an obvious
though effective instance - the music
isn't as specifically pictorial as the
track titles would indicate, at its
best when playing against expectations.
The "Pirates" of track 2, for example,
are a bumptious, jaunty crew out of
Peter Pan rather than Errol Flynn
swashbucklers. The smaller-scaled moments,
including the tender lyrical strains
for Livy, Twain's love interest, are
charming and appealing. On the other
hand, the sliding Hawaiian steel guitar
in track 23 ("World Tour Begins") is
simply a distraction, and the final
choral perorations are a bit much.
Under William Stromberg,
an experienced film and pop conductor,
the Moscow Symphony has the measure
both of the music's big, splashy effects
and of its gentler passages, and capture
its American accents reasonably. The
engineering, by a Russian crew, lags
somewhat behind the Western state of
the art, much as it did in the Communist
era. It offers both brilliance and depth,
along with an occasional hard edge that
doesn't sound like a function of the
playing, and sometimes the winds are
indiscreetly over-miked.
Stephen Francis
Vasta
Moscow Symphony Orchestra and Chorus/William
Stromberg 
