Curious and interesting new record from the 100 Years of Film Music 1895-1995 collection, centered on the figure of french composer Charles Koechlin, contemporary of Ravel and Satie -among some other great musicians-, an absolute strange to the majority of the audience. In spite of his extense output (more than 200 compositions), Koechlin kept a love/repulse relationship with the Cinema since he saw, in 1933, Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), and although he never valued the music that he heard on the movies, he compose some works more or less related to the media.The bigger one, The Seven Stars's Symphony, emerge in 1933 in a spontaneously way as an hommage to a series of emblematic figures of that time, each one of them with a movement of varied entity and complexity: Douglas Fairbanks, orientalized and inspired by The Thief of Bagdad (1924); Lilian Harvey, nice and graceful; Greta Garbo, with a clean melody on the Ondes Martenot; Clara Bow, light and sparkling; Marlene Dietrich, eloquent and respectful; Emil Jannings, grave and solemn, curiously created as an epilogue to Der Blaue Engel; and Charles Chaplin, the more complex and interesting, structured on nine parts, variations over two themes generated by the musical notation of the great actor/director's name. As a counterpoint, the brief 1947 Quatre Interludes, which should be worked as intermezzos of a ballet, Voyages, maked from five of the Stars' Symphony movements, and which was never performed during the author's life. Finally, L'Andalouse dans Barcelone it was composed directly for the movies, as part of the soundtrack of the documentary Croisiéres avec l'escadre (1933), but Koechlin's music never get to the screen -in one of the first instances of a rejected score, so in use these days-. Brilliant and spanish, this light piece stays as a perfect example of the stupendous orchestral handling by an author whose music, at less, should be recognized at its right measure. A.L.
/ RCA VICTOR 09026-68146-2 / 53'
