It seems that the label Varèse Sarabande is not ready to give a breathing to the film music fans, and more specifically since its joint with Fox in order to publish classical soundtracks of that label. If spectacular were all the titles until now issued, the CD that now occupy us will take our senses away. Do you imagine a record where there are original and unpublished themes from Hugo Friedhofer, Alfred Newman, Victor Young, Bernard Herrmann, Alex North, Jerry Goldsmith ...? Well, here you have it.The compilation has twenty-nine cues, and expands itself in a period between 1947 with Bernard Herrmann's The Ghost and Mrs. Muir), with a theme not included in the Elmer Bernstein recording for his Film Music Collection, and 1970 with Jerry Goldsmith's Patton, the year when Alfred Newman dies, what makes that many considered his loss as the end of the Golden Age of Film Music. To start we have Franz Waxman's Prince Valiant (1954), with a really memorable main titles, and whose soundtrack has been announced by Varése as a future edition; to continue, jewels that will make the delights of the collectors, like Hugo Friedhofer's The Rains Of Ranchipur (1955), Victor Young's The Tall Men (1955), on one of his last works, or Jerry Goldsmith's The Stripper (1963), one of his first compositions; very curious is the inclusion of the theme that Alex North composed for the ballet sequence of Daddy Long Legs (1955), whose score was signed by Alfred Newman. For the fans, this CD is a terrific example of the marvellous things that will may publish Varése in conjuction with Fox. As a nice note in the booklet there is a very special dedication, as the CD is on Charles Gerhardt remembrance, an orchestra conductor that in the seventies bet blindly for film music with some historical recordings (The Classics Films Scores...), unsurpassed until now and that make us film music fans in permanent debt with him. A.M.
