to Each His Own 1946

It was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.”

Career-slipping movie star Carole Raymond (Kay Francis) buys in as a real estate partner of Jeff Caldwell (Paul Cavanagh). Actually, through his secretary, Nola Reed (Veda Ann Borg), Caldwell runs a matrimonial bureau and, with the aid of his associate, Lee Kirby (John Gallaudet), they defraud and blackmail a large group of lonely people…

It was a musical cocktail born in a marketing meeting: Two parts easy listening, one part jazz, a healthy dollop of conga drums, a sprinkling of bird calls, and a pinch of textless choir. Serve garnished with an alluring woman on the album jacket for best results. Liberty Records co-founder Si Waronker called it Exotica; the soundtrack for a mythical air conditioned Eden, packaged for mid-century, tiki torch-wielding armchair safariers. In the five years after Exotica—Martin Denny’s 1957 landmark Liberty debut—arrived, hundreds of other ethnographic forgeries washed up in record racks all over the U.S., bearing titles like Sophisticated Savage, Sacred Idol, Chant of the Jungle, Polynesian Paradise, Exotic Paradise, Taboo, Primitiva, Forbidden Island, Afrodesia, Hypnotique, Percussion Exotique, and a barrel’s worth of other portmanteaus. “All of those ica and itiva endings I came up with because I thought I was being cute,” Waronker said. “And I don’t know why, but nobody got wise.”

Utamaro, a great artist, lives to create portraits of beautiful women, and the brothels of Tokyo provide his models. A world of passion swirls around him, as the women in his life vie for lovers. And, occasionally, his art gets him into trouble.

A string quartet was among the very first works that Edvard Grieg presented after completing his studies in 1861, but the Quartet in G minor, Op. 27, was the only such work to be published in his lifetime. In 1878, while composing it, Grieg wrote that ‘it aims at breadth, to soar, and, above all, at vigorous sound’, and the amplitude of the sound is indeed striking: the generous use of double-stops creates an almost orchestral effect, unusual for the genre. This caused some reviewers to criticize the quartet as being unidiomatic, while others, including Liszt, greeted it with enthusiasm. Some thirty years later, when Jean Sibelius composed his D minor quartet Op. 56, he too had previous experience of writing for the medium, but Op. 56 is the only quartet among his mature works. The often used 'nickname' Voces intimae is often taken to refer to the intimate interchange between the four voices in a quartet, but is probably a more specific allusion to a brief passage in the third movement: Sibelius wrote the remark into a score some time after the work had been published.

Toni’s story centres on an Italian immigrant, Antonio Canova (Charles Blavette), a labourer at a local quarry who has become entangled in relationships with his landlady (Jenny Helia) and with the young, hot-blooded Spaniard, Josefa (Celia Montalvan). As Josefa’s life disintegrates through rape and a necessitous marriage to the brutish foreman Albert (Max Dalban), Toni is caught up in a series of marriages gone sour and the psychological fragility of those he cares for.