Kraft

The music presented on this compilation, “Framed Space” consists of a selection of works from the first three years of Melody As Truth.

Hudson Hawk was an action-comedy vehicle for a post-Die Hard Bruce Willis, directed by Michael Lehmann. Willis plays Eddie Hawkins, a master thief who, on the day of his parole from prison, suddenly finds himself blackmailed into committing a series of elaborate heists. The complicated plot involves the Italian Mafia, an evil international conglomerate, the artwork of Leonardo da Vinci, and a machine that turns lead into gold, but it’s really just an excuse for Willis and his co-star Danny Aiello to engage in various globe-trotting escapades of comic tomfoolery. The film co-stars Andie MacDowell, James Coburn, and Richard E. Grant, and unfortunately was an enormous box-office flop; audiences seemingly couldn’t reconcile Willis’s tough guy persona with the film’s slapstick comedy action, bizarre sound effects, and surreal humor. Musically, Hudson Hawk is an enjoyable oddity. One of the conceits in the story is that the characters played by Willis and Aiello often spontaneously burst into song, as a way to synchronize the timing of their heists. The pair sing several tracks, two of which – Bing Crosby’s “Swinging on a Star” from Going My Way (which won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1944), and Paul Anka’s “Side by Side” – are featured on the film’s soundtrack.

This CD brings a Czech label new to me and two concertos which are billed as world premiere recordings. Indeed, I don’t believe that I have ever heard any of Kraft’s music: neither he nor his father features in the Oxford Companion to Music, though they receive a short joint entry in the Concise Grove. Mikuláš (Nikolaus) Kraft was the son of Anton or Antonín Kraft a member of the Esterházy orchestra and composition pupil of its director, Haydn. Nikolaus was born at Esterházy-Kastély, as it is now known, and no less a person than the Prince was his godfather.

Walter Kraft (Cologne, 9 June 1905 – Amsterdam, 9 May 1977) was a German organist and composer, best known for his remarkably long tenure (almost half a century, 1926–72) at the Marienkirche, Lübeck…