Benjamin Frankel

Benjamin Frankel's music, if you have not encountered it before, is atonally lyrical - Berg rather than Schoenberg. His violin concerto (also on CPO) is among the finest works of the century and can easily stand compare with the Berg and the Schuman. The film music, of which there are many scores (most of which will have to be reconstructed by the hopefully indefatigable Dmitri Kennaway), are fibrous British film music of the 1950s and 1960s in which Frankel marginally softens his pallet for cinema audiences. Interesting that Elizabeth Lutyens made money from using her avant-garde style for horror films. Frankel's concert and chamber works (CPO have the complete string quartets) are ominous, lyrical, threatening, gloomy, charged with the uncertain catastrophic spirit of the times. These various works achieved as …..

Rob Barnett @ musicweb-international.com

Benjamin Frankel (1906-73) was a British composer best known for his film scores, but that is only one aspect of his output. Here are two symphonies, very impressive compositions which make use of atonal / serial techniques yet have clear themes and melodies, transparent scoring, and a direct emotional appeal. They are both strongly atmospheric, reflecting perhaps Frankel's skills as a film composer. The 2nd is a formidable, aggressively bleak work, suggestive of some sort of prolonged crisis. At times it threatens ……

Dante Alighieri, born in Florence in 1265, was at once a poet and an important political figure of his time. His celebrated Divine Comedy relates his supposed descent to Hell and slow ascent to Paradise. Godard’s operatic treatment of his life (1890) skilfully juxtaposes the political milieu – crowd scenes in Florence and the quarrel between Guelfs and Ghibellines – with the expression of the courtly love he feels for Beatrice, betrothed to his friend Bardi.

British Light Music Classics 1 (CDA66868) was one of the best-selling CDs of 1996 and put lots of smiles on people's faces. In fact it is still—late January—in the charts. Its success has inspired this second disc which contains another 20 well-known favourites spanning the century, the earliest being Bucalossi's Grasshopper's Dance from 1905 and Herman Finck's In the Shadows from 1910. Once again many of the pieces will be familiar as radio and TV signature tunes—to 'Down Your Way', 'Dr Finlay's Casebook', 'TV Newsreel', 'The Archers' and, from the 1940s, 'In Town Tonight', the first broadcast of which brought tens of thousands of requests to the BBC for the name of the introductory music, Eric Coates's march Knightsbridge.