Total Film July 2019

The first popular jazz singer to move audiences with the intense, personal feeling of classic blues, Billie Holiday changed the art of American pop vocals forever. More than a half-century after her death, it's difficult to believe that prior to her emergence, jazz and pop singers were tied to the Tin Pan Alley tradition and rarely personalized their songs; only blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey actually gave the impression they had lived through what they were singing.

Marin Marais (1656-1728)est ajourd'hui célèbre grâce au fabuleux corpus de pièces pour violes de gambe qu'il nous a laissé et qui ont été remises à l'honneur avec le célèbre film "Tous les matins du monde" et les disques de Jordi Savall Mais Marais a aussi écrit 4 opéras dont Alcione, le meilleur d'entre eux.
Avant son enregistrement, celui-ci avait la réputation d'être digne des chefs-d'oeuvre de Lully et annonciateur des splendeurs ramistes, mais pour certains figé dans les règles passéistes du grand style français et refusant malencontreusement les harmonies italianisantes chères à Campra et Charpentier.

Sir Richard Rodney Bennett’s Gothic opera The Mines of Sulphur is reminiscent of suspense thrillers from Edgar Allan Poe to Alfred Hitchcock. Love, longing, and dark as well as light comedy abound in this macabre tale of greed and retribution set in a haunted manor house in the West of England. The title of the tale, taken from Shakespeare’s Othello, refers to the theme of gradual corruption.

Bernard Herrmann, born in New York in 1911 to Russian immigrants, is best known today as a composer of film music. Most notably he worked with Alfred Hitchcock on classic productions such as North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho, as well as on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. But despite his strong ties to Hollywood, Herrmann always thought of himself as a composer who worked in film, and never as a ‘mere’ film composer.

The abundant concert works of Italian composer Nino Rota continue to surface in recordings, many on major labels. Doubtless this is partly because Rota carries marquee value from his association with the Godfather films, but his music, although surely a mixed bag, is often just plain fun. You can break it down into three general categories, which don't necessarily correspond to individual works but are heard in combination. First is the group of marvelously cinematic tunes that make this release of interest to the still-numerous fans of Rota's film music; the Concerto Soirée for piano and orchestra offers a generous selection.