Korngold: Another Dawn & Escape me Never - William T. Stromberg
1995 | Ape + Cue | Scans in PDF | 61':20' | 229 MBs | 3 Files

Although it may be surprising, there are still enough hidden treasures in the not excessively long catalogue of Korngold's film music; some of them for sheer oblivion, some other for its difficulty to be found. We already mention on our review of the Rhino double CD The Warner Bros Years, the fact of the allegedly disappearance of Another Dawn (1937) original masters, what marked it the only unavailable title of the Korngold/Warner relationship. This gap is now covered thanks to the efforts of arranger and composer John W. Morgan, in a new demonstration of patience and love for a music; submitted to the avatars of fate, this forgotten score for the forgotten William Dieterle film includes, curiously, one of the more well-known themes of his author, the one he used later on the beginning of his famous Violin Concerto, op.35. Korngold's usual symphonic and thematic unfolding, still on his first steps inside the movie business, with some so personal musical gestures which more than mahlerian are unmistakable viennese, finds a nice complement on the programmatic ballet composed for Escape Me Never (1947), the last of his collaborations with the Warners which saw the public light -although, really, it was composed before Deception (1946)-, a colourful work yet to be uncovered on its whole, which after its naive and scarcely original plot includes the only popular song composed by Korngold (Love for Love), as well this terrific musical fantasy, nicely rounded by Morgan because on the film it was abruptly interrupted. As a counterpoint, and without losing value his work, once again there is the lack of a bit of passion on Stromberg's baton, as it happens on The Prince and the Pauper, but this is one of those cases on which the importance of the music is far above the rest.

Review by bs magazine

Rarely do we come across as intimate and wide-angled a set as this collection of Dmitri Shostakovich's 15 string quartets, all of them played by the Russian Borodin Quartet. Recorded in Moscow between 1978 and 1983, the quartets are excellently reproduced in digital sound by Sviatoslav Richter, who maintains just enough shadow from the old Melodiya vinyl's audio vérité to make the music breathe passionately. Of course, it's the Borodins who really amp up the musical breath, whether in their near-giddy reading of the third quartet's first movement or in the 14th's complex, stoutly metaphysical somberness. These recordings will likely always remain the standard for Shostakovich's chamber repertoire because the Borodins were so focused on the Russian quartet literature and so little of anything they played by one composer approached the immediate, mature fullness of Shostakovich's quartets from the first to the last. And they played the music with unflagging intensity. Over the six CDs, it's a fascinating exercise to hear the development of compositional elements between the first (1935) and 15th (1974, the year before his death) quartets. Variations on the passacaglia technique, for example, permeate the music, allowing telescopic focus on Shostakovich's careful mediation of the dialogue between constancy and change, flying motifs from violin to viola to cello and back even as it appeared little fundamental groundwork had changed. Polyphony, dissonance, and aching resonance find a home in the music, showing Shostakovich's Catholic reach–and surely the impetus for his long-standing troubled relationship with Soviet politics.

Andrew Bartlett (Amazon.com)