{"id":2628,"date":"2011-04-04T02:45:10","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T06:45:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mondomark.com\/wordpress\/?p=1817"},"modified":"2011-04-04T02:45:10","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T06:45:10","slug":"doing-it-right-gerhardt-korngold-and-rca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=2628","title":{"rendered":"Doing it right: Gerhardt, Korngold, and RCA"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s quite possible many households during the seventies had at least one of Charles Gerhardt\u2019s classical recordings done by RCA for Reader\u2019s Digest. When I was a brat, my mother used to babysit in the apartment where I initially grew up, and even after we moved to Cuesta Verde<\/a>– I mean, North York, she maintained ties with a few of the old apartment friends, and babysat one monster child named Richard.<\/p>\n

The kid was a smash & grab creature who twice \u2013 twice <\/em>\u2013 fiddled with the knobs and handles in his mother\u2019s VW bug and crashed the car into our garage door. He also yanked a large stuffed fish pillow from under my head and made my cranium strike the concrete floor.<\/p>\n

The bastard was a classic terror child \u2013 when my mother and I dropped by his mum\u2019s apartment to slide a letter through the door slot, I peeked under the door and saw nothing but littered busted toys all across the carpet \u2013 but his mother worked for RCA, and the trade-offs for bruised brains and crunched garages were free portable radios, free kid\u2019s albums (like the RCA Camden Dr. Seuss LPs), and the odd classical title \u2013 or so it seemed.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until maybe my early teens that I pulled our Gerhardt\u2019s re-recording of Max Steiner\u2019s Gone with the Wind<\/strong>, and while I wasn\u2019t blown away with the music, the very existence of film music on a record seemed unique. It wasn\u2019t until a few years later that I made the connection between the Tony Thomas-produced Max Steiner LPs I was buying at Sam Record Man with the GWTW LP, and realized the RCA album was part of a series released by the label during the seventies, and were largely still in print.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written before what a bitch it was to get a label\u2019s full roster in Canada \u2013 we just didn\u2019t get more than half the titles of any label\u2019s series because of import issues, or the distributor not giving a damn \u2013 so I only learned of other volumes based on what was listed in the liner notes or album sleeves, and it never seemed to end.<\/p>\n

You bought one LP, and Bang! there were Humphrey Bogart and Errol Flynn albums. Some I never managed to find because they didn’t get reissued, but both the Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Waxman and Max Steiner albums remained available in Canada.<\/p>\n

The history of these Classic Film albums is somewhat simple in that they were a natural offshoot of the RCA-Reader\u2019s Digest classic sets and individual releases, but what made them unique for the time was the extreme care Gerhardt and co-producer George (son of Erich Wolfgang) Korngold extended to the music.<\/p>\n

As ‘Gene Tyranny’ writes in All Music<\/a>, he approached the composers and worked out what music to focus on, and how to arrange it. Then had themes and dramatic cuts fleshed out into flowing \u00a0suites and extracts that not only captured the classic sound of Golden and Silver Age composers, but emphasized their brilliance as masters of orchestral writing.<\/p>\n

It is fair to say at this point that Gerhardt probably encountered elitism among critics, fellow producers, and even snooty concert composers who felt anything film-related was rubbish. Not serious, not relevant, and a waste of time. The albums were like best-of hit collections for the idiot masses, to be spun like Mantovani <\/a>and anesthetized listeners in place of intellectual or emotional provocation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I started it all!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Gerhardt\u2019s decision to engage in a series of LPs was daring for the time, because prior to the first release \u2013 The Sea Hawk: The Film Music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold<\/strong> \u2013 few film composers treated themselves to suites & themes albums.<\/p>\n

Alfred Newman did a few for Decca, as did Max Steiner for RCA, Victor Young for Decca, Dimitri Tiomkin for Coral, Elmer Bernstein for Decca and in the sixties for Ava Records, but they were all either rare suites \/ one-off albums done during the fifties, or hit themes dumbed-down for the easy listening crowd.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t say the composers were to blame, even when they produced the LPs or arranged the music for easy to swallow spoon-sizes. The fifties were not that friendly to film score LPs, and the increased push to have a hit theme song in a film decided not only what music was released, but how.<\/p>\n

Newman\u2019s Anastasia <\/strong>did get an LP release, but so did Pat Boone\u2019s single version. Tiomkin\u2019s Dial M for Murder<\/strong> only appeared as part of a theme collection of \u2018romantic\u2019 and moody themes rather than re-recorded score cuts.<\/p>\n

Young re-recorded small suites of themes for Decca’s 10″ LPs, but perhaps the first move to re-record a chunk of a score for a single album came from Warner Bros. Records., where in-house music director Ray Heindorf (re-billed simply as “Heindorf”) supervised the productions of Young’s For Whom the Bell Tolls <\/strong>and Miklos Rozsa’s Spellbound <\/strong>in 1958, under the label’s new hi-fi sound imprint, Vitaphonic Stereo.<\/p>\n

Both WB re-recordings were slowly paced, schmaltzy, and lacked the fury endemic to the original screen recordings (or the composers’ own suite recordings from the forties).<\/p>\n

Themes-from-and-inspired-by albums didn\u2019t yet exist, but wishy-washy-themes-from-plus-these-other-great-hits were popping up on the horizon, mostly in re-recorded collections suited for every taste and loungy, leisure room persuasion. Most of those collections littered the used LP bins for years, and none of the ones I sampled were ever any good. They cluttered used shops for a reason.<\/p>\n

Gerhardt\u2019s approach included fidelity to the composer\u2019s vision (or pretty damn close to), the music\u2019s dramatic impact (or least evocative of its impact when experienced with sound and picture), and as a representation of the composer\u2019s best creative work. The music was also performed and recorded and engineered like fine classical music, and the albums had a wonderful flow \u2013 either mimicking a concert, or a rousing musical experience that, like a Shostakovich symphony, was meant to blast from your high-end hi-fi system.<\/p>\n

The albums were so well engineered that they were released in stereo, in Quadraphonic sound, and later on CD in Dolby Surround when that process was in vogue during the eighties and early nineties.<\/p>\n

From a purist\u2019s stand, the morphing sound designs might have been annoying, but the multiple releases did illustrate the instincts of Gerhardt and fellow series producer Korngold: if you make the album with sincere professionalism, it will have legs.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not wrong to assume the Gerhardt-Korngold high standard influenced other producers to exceed expectations in other music idioms when crafting their own albums. (One can see similarities with Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Collection, which the composer set up in the seventies to record and release suites and single score albums of neglected music by marginalized composers.)<\/p>\n

Not unlike RCA\u2019s Living Stereo series of the fifties, the Gerhardt albums remain superb recordings deserving of praise for their engineering and the producers’ innate good taste that pretty much ensured the music reflected the peak quality of the era in which it was composed, rather than the polar extreme – UA\u2019s series of wretched re-recordings produced by Leroy Holmes that turned stirring music into echoey, slowed-down ugliness typical of bad seventies orchestrating, and bad recording techniques. (Even Decca tree albums sounded better.)<\/p>\n

The fact the masters still <\/em>sound good is also a tribute to the RCA crew who took care of them and ensured the multi-track elements could be flexed into Quad, Dolby 4.0, or punchy 2.0 Stereo.<\/p>\n

The Classic Film Score series also seemed to motivate Tony Thomas into believing he too could ride on the Gerhardt wave and release LPs of original archival score material in smaller runs, mining unreleased acetate material from the Max Steiner Society, or utterly forgotten music by Hans J. Salter, Miklos Rozsa, and even Alfred Newman \u2013 notably the latter\u2019s Captain from Castile<\/strong>, which Gerhardt re-recorded a few stellar theme selections, too.<\/p>\n

Each competing effort fed off the other, and even if one could credit John Williams\u2019 Star Wars<\/strong> for rekindling an interest in large orchestral scores with classical designs, the interest in going back to old, ignored catalogues seemed to begin when Gerhardt released that first Korngold LP which became a best-seller.<\/p>\n

Yes, it was Korngold, not Newman or Hugo Friedhofer, but it got the ball rolling.<\/p>\n

So while the other major labels were keen on putting out other Williams-y scores, indie labels sprouted up and took advantage of some classic music languishing in studio vaults. Varese Sarabande raided the Decca archives, and sometimes did their own restoration of newly found masters (Island in the Sky<\/strong>, Themes from Horror Movies<\/a><\/strong>), acetates, or previously unreleased material.<\/p>\n

Varese probably would\u2019ve sprouted on its own, but RCA\u2019s ongoing and in-print series sure helped.<\/p>\n

That brings me to the actual RCA run, which gets complicated because the LPs were released individually, in a boxed set with additional music, reissued on LP in their original shorter running times, reissued on CD in the same manner, reissued in Germany with more music, reissued in Dolby Surround, and now we\u2019ve come back again with the entire RCA run of the original album releases back in action in CD and MP3 formats.<\/p>\n

The best catalogue and dissection of the series was done in 1998 (!) by R. Mike Murray for Film Score Monthly Daily. This link<\/a> has probably gotten more hits in the last six months than in 1998, and bless FSM for keeping it active online.<\/p>\n

Murray gives an overview of the series, breaks down what music was & wasn\u2019t on which release, and he tries not to make your head hurt.<\/p>\n

The new run from RCA on their Red Seal imprint features new masterings, which do sound different from the Surround Sound versions from the late eighties, but that makes sense because upwards of 11 years have yielded a few major technological advancements, as well as re-appraisals of how to apply digital gear.<\/p>\n

When Tony Thomas released Newman\u2019s Captain from Castile<\/strong> on his Delos LP label, the original source was the set of Mercury 78s, albeit processed a bit with then-novel sound enhancement gear. That approach also extended to the Facets CD, and it was also applied in the eighties when Thomas released an Alfred Newman compilation for the Varese CD Club series, featuring Castile <\/strong> extracts from an older Mercury release, heavily reprocessed into a stereophonic, boom-friendly sound design. Prior to the Screen Archives complete score release, I had to reach back to the Mercury LP of the fifties to get the cleaner true mono recording.<\/p>\n

Silly, isn’t it?<\/p>\n

It just illustrates how a new sound enhancing toy is sometimes overused to \u2018open up\u2019 older recordings because few understand the new toy’s far-reaching effects years later. Ergo, producers always learn less is sometimes more and where a specific toy works best, and nowhere else. What\u2019s remarkable is how Gerhardt and Korngold got it right so many times 30+ years ago.<\/p>\n

So, without further editorial blather, I\u2019ve uploaded the first four reviews of the remastered Gerhardt-Korngold Classic Film Score series lot, starting with the David Raksin<\/a> [M<\/a>], Franz Waxman<\/a> [M<\/a>], Alfred Newman<\/a> [M<\/a>], and Dimitri Tiomkin<\/a> [M<\/a>] albums.<\/p>\n

For those whose first exposure to any of the represented composers starts with this re-launched series, dig into Gerhardt series, and if you like the wares of any composer, go nuts.<\/p>\n

Seriously<\/em>. There\u2019s so much music out there now in complete form, and you owe it to yourself to look back if your listening habits are saturated with the same stuff released in the last 10 years. Of course you won’t like all of it, but you will find someone whose music will impress, and your tastes will suddenly begin to broaden, branching to classic film music, classical music, period hits, and new re-recordings and idiomatic versions. Things always expand from a hungry interest.<\/p>\n

Seriously.\u00a0It\u2019s all good.<\/em><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mark R. Hasan<\/strong>, Editor
\nKQEK.com<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First reviews of the newly remastered CDs of the classic RCA released, Charles Gerhardt conducted, George Korngold produced Classic Film Music series from the seventies, plus an appreciation of this enduring string of audiophile albums…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[355,370,373,376,374,377,371,372],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-Go","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}