The new RCA-BMG collection, 100 Years of Film Music 1895-1995, offer a different panorama of the Film Music world, and tries to retrieve forgotten or lost scores. After Hans Erdmann's Nosferatu, one of the first Film History works with certain magnitude, comes Panamericana, one of the only two film scores of german composer Winfried Zillig, disciple of Arnold Schoenberg and another of the examples of a misplaced in time musician after the World War II. Author of five operas and numerous symphonic and chamber works, Zillig was the election of director Hans Domnick for his impressive three-hour documentary, travelling along the american continent. Premiered on two parts (in 1959 and 1962), the unavoidable market and distributors alterations ended almost ruining and destroying the film; the recovering of such a work is perfectly represented on the booklet which comes with the record, and we refer to it. What it can be hear is an stupendous work of almost eighty minutes, excellently worked and orchestrated, and two orchestral suites which the author premiered a little before his decease in 1963. The solid theoretic and technical basis of Zillig's music is obvious along the score, and is enough to say that all of it is worked as a sort of gigantic symphonic variations over a theme, the one heared on the opening in a spectacular fanfare (Introduction); the physical descent along the american continent is easy to follow over the different mutations produced on this theme, altered by influences, timbres and harmonies of each zone of the continent. M.A.F.

Panamericana: TraumstraBe der Welt (1958-60) - 76:03
Panamericana - Orchestral Suites (1962) - 29:53
Arranged and Restored by Wolfgang Gottschalk
Rundfunk Symphony Orchestra, Berlin - Conductor: Georg Fritzsch
/ RCA VICTOR 09026-62659-2 [2CD] / 106'

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