Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
With the rise of Hitler, many outstanding European composers, including Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner, exiled themselves to North America. Following a vicious street assault by Nazis, Franz Waxman, a former jazz musician who had orchestrated Friedrich Hollaender's score for the Marlene Dietrich classic The Blue Angel (1930), also left for Hollywood. His first American score was for James Whale's The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), which following Steiner's King Kong (1933), remains one of the earliest symphonic movie scores of the sound era. (A genuine horror classic, a loving tribute is paid to the film in the 1998 movie Gods and Monsters.) Waxman's richly orchestrated score is by turns exciting and humorous, with a sinuous, almost sultry jazz influence revealing the composer's background. If in places the music sounds corny today, that's because it has been a victim of its own success, imitated and parodied ever since. Yet in 1935 this was an exhilarating new sound, the effect on audiences electrifying, the music recycled for many later productions, most famously the Flash Gordon serials. In this excellent modern recording every detail of this classic score can finally be heard, and the album even includes selections not used in the released film. The short suite from The Invisible Ray is a worthy addition, as are the informative booklet notes. Other fine Waxman scores available in modern recordings include Rebecca and Mrs Skeffington. --Gary S. Dalkin
From Amazon.com
The sound era was barely seven years old (and the art of orchestral film scoring still evolving) when German-born composer Franz Waxman conjured up one of its first unlikely film-music masterpieces, this 1935 score for director James Whale's sequel to his hit Frankenstein. Indeed, Waxman created many of what have become the musical clichés of the horror genre, captured here in a spectacular new digital recording by Kenneth Alwyn and the Westminster Philharmonic; the exotic, lilting motif to "Female Monster Music" will even evoke Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Bali Ha'i," though it was written nearly 15 years earlier! Also included is a short suite from Waxman's score for another, less-heralded, '30s Universal horror film, the Karloff-starring The Invisible Ray; both are thoroughly annotated in a fashion that will please fans, musicians, and scholars alike. --Jerry McCulley