Golden Age Hollywood and Beyond: The Composers

The selection of music for the Golden Age Hollywood and Beyond concerts range across forty-seven years of classic Hollywood film scores, known as the Golden Age and feature some of the greatest film composers of all time. The scores embrace a variety of genres including romance, war, gangsters, Shakespeare, thrillers and historical epics. The one thing they all have in common is their pre-eminent ability to use music to create timeless stories that still resonate with us today.

Hungarian-born Miklós Rózsa had already scored Quo Vadis (1951) and most of MGM’s 50s historical films from Ivanhoe to Julius Caesar, so the coming of the Roman behemoth Ben-Hur in 1959 held few qualms for him. The programme includes the Prelude, representing in fanfares the strutting power of Ancient Rome and resolving into the even greater power of nascent Christianity, complete with reverent bells and mystical compassion, The Mother’s Love, a beautiful, keening piece underscoring the quiet warmth of scenes at home with his mother and his lover Esther and Parade of the Charioteers, the long sequence as the chariots take turns around the jaw-droppingly large Circus Maximus course in advance of the famous race.

Ben Hur is considered by many to be Rózsa’s greatest score, showing off as it does his extraordinary ability to create heartbreaking melodies alongside complex harmonic and thematic motifs, full of emotional strength and authenticity and carrying echoes of his brilliant earlier work with film noirs of the 1940s such as Double Indemnity. So too does his sumptuous violin concerto, from which the Lento Cantabile emerges as a mournful series of digressions through tonalities familiar from Rózsa’s earlier work, leading into the Allegro Vivace, a violent chase full of fireworks at breakneck speed. Originally premiered in 1956 by Jascha Heifetz, Rózsa later adapted the concerto for Billy Wilder’s 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

Bernard Herrmann created possibly his finest score for Alfred Hitchcock, Vertigo, which references Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, the music full of yearning, warning and deep desire. The music builds remorselessly, refusing to resolve until the full orchestra finally explodes into a passionate and tender love theme of tremendous proportions, which has been hinted at from the start of the film.

In the mid-40s, David Raksin created his most famous score for Otto Preminger’s slick, chic murder mystery Laura, a haunting theme that Raksin claimed ‘seemed to write itself’ after his wife left him on the weekend he was composing the theme. His music for Vincente Minnelli’s 1952 The Bad and the Beautiful sums up the world of contemporary Hollywood that the film set out to celebrate and satirise, and the conflicted and glamorous personalities surrounding an uncompromising film director played by Kirk Douglas. In the style of MGM’s genius arranger Conrad Salinger, Raksin’s soaring melodies intertwine in complex webs of glorious tonality, full of jazz chording and memorable melodies, carried by trumpet, sax and full orchestra.

Possibly one of the best-known movie themes of all time is Max Steiner’s music for Gone with the Wind, its sweep and power evident from the first moment, arranged with typically lush authenticity by John Wilson. Work on that enormous film took Steiner three months and utilised folk songs of the period as well as Civil War marching songs across 99 separate music cues. In creating ‘Tara’s Theme’, summing up the family home at the centre of the epic Civil War drama and featured in the opening titles, Steiner created probably his finest ever theme, incredibly within the same year he scored Casablanca.

William Walton’s score for Laurence Olivier’s Henry V is the peak of his film work, his completely original yet authentic-sounding melodies seamlessly woven into Shakespeare’s verse but breaking out into stunning set-pieces with the charge of the French knights, the death of Falstaff and the siege of Harfleur. Often cited as the greatest British film score of all time, the music has lived on away from the film in several concert suites of the music, despite Walton’s own conviction that film music was ineffective away from the screen. This superb suite proves him wrong.

Nino Rota’s waltz from The Godfather evolves into a keeningly romantic countermelody, speaking of Vito Corleone’s (Marlon Brando) humble beginnings in rural Sicily. It is memorably introduced at the very start of the film against a black screen by a solo, full-throated trumpet playing a mournful, Italianate waltz, eventually accompanied by slow, doom-laden chords and a sprightly pizzicato and accordion three-time motif.

Ennio Morricone, one of the all-time great composers, is represented through three scores that sum up his broad, eclectic oeuvre. First, the wandering beauty of ‘Gabriel’s Oboe’ from The Mission, then selections from his spectacular score to Cinema Paradiso, full of his signature melodies, dripping with nostalgia and a deep love and understanding of cinematic fantasies. Finally, Once Upon a Time in America, one of his memorable, signature arias like the main theme from Once Upon a Time in the West that transforms a gangster genesis tale starring Robert De Niro, James Woods and Elizabeth McGovern into an operatic and timeless tale of violence and friendship, greed and heartbreak.