Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Started by tjguitar, April 15, 2007, 06:23:22 PM

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tjguitar

One of my favorite non-British composers, especially a fan of his film work. But his cello concerto is one of my favorite cello concerto's and the concerto for piano left hand.  There's some fantastic recordings out there of Korngol's film and concert work.  As far as film goes, the two Charles Gerhardt conducted compilations are on top for me, I also enjoy Varujan Kojian's recordings of The Sea Hawk and Adventures of Robin Hood with the Utah Symphony on Varese sarabande. Both were originally on LP so they are only around 40-45 minutes long, We already have a complete Adventures of Robin Hood on MARCO POLO with WIlliam Stromberg and the Moscow Symphony, they also have recorded The Sea hawk and Deception which should be released any time now.  I go to chandos for the concert work but I still don't have a recording of his (arguably most famous!) concert works his Symphony in F# and Violin Concerto.

Can't wait for the upcoming 2 disc complete score to the Sea Hawk on Naxos. 




Gurn Blanston

And oddly, his violin concerto in D is the only work of his that I DO have! It is a lovely late Romantic piece, rich and lush. Even though I don't listen to a lot of 20th century music, I always have a soft spot for this work. I have Perlman, playing it along with the Goldmark a minor concerto, another great late Romantic classic. :)

8)
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Haydn: that genius of vulgar music who induces an inordinate thirst for beer - Mily Balakirev (1860)

Harry

#2
The first three of the Chandos I have also, and think them very good in sound and interpretation. Added to that are some discs I have on CPO. which are also worth while to check out

vandermolen

I like the Symphony and Cello Concerto.  There are a number of good recordings of the former by Previn (DGG), Downes (Chandos), De Priest (Delos) and Kempe (Varese Saraband nla).
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

Wanderer

Regarding the marvelous cello concerto, the best version known to me is on the Korngold Arthaus DVD, with an incandescent Quirine Viersen.

tjguitar



Can't wait for this.  May 29th release date in the UK, some sound clips at screenarchives.com :)

sound67

Quote from: tjguitar on April 15, 2007, 06:23:22 PMI go to chandos for the concert work but I still don't have a recording of his (arguably most famous!) concert works his Symphony in F# and Violin Concerto.

Go for these versions:



Thomas
"Vivaldi didn't compose 500 concertos. He composed the same concerto 500 times" - Igor Stravinsky

"Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours." - Norman Lebrecht

sound67

Quote from: tjguitar on May 20, 2007, 09:14:36 PM


Can't wait for this.  May 29th release date in the UK, some sound clips at screenarchives.com :)

As with all other Stromberg/Moscow recordings, this should not be better than OK. I heard Chandos also recorded the entire The Sea Hawk under Rumon Gamba...

Thomas
"Vivaldi didn't compose 500 concertos. He composed the same concerto 500 times" - Igor Stravinsky

"Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours." - Norman Lebrecht

The new erato

I'd go for Welzer-Møst on a cheap EMI CD for the symphony.

Harry Collier


There is a fine CD (Oehms OC 537) with Benjamin Schmid and the Vienna Philharmonic playing the violin concerto, David Frühwirth playing the Much Ado About Nothing suite, and a group including Schmid playing the Suite for 2 violins, cello and piano. Well worth acquiring and getting to know. Somehow, it being an all-Austrian cast, recorded in Austria, gives the music the appropriate dash of schmaltz. The recording comes from the 2004 Salzburg Festival.


sound67

Quote from: Harry Collier on May 21, 2007, 03:09:24 AM
There is a fine CD (Oehms OC 537) with Benjamin Schmid and the Vienna Philharmonic playing the violin concerto

What's not so nice about this particular live recording is that there is applause - after the 1st movement !!! Why they didn't edit this out I will never know.

Thomas
"Vivaldi didn't compose 500 concertos. He composed the same concerto 500 times" - Igor Stravinsky

"Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours." - Norman Lebrecht

Harry Collier

Quote from: sound67 on May 21, 2007, 03:14:34 AM
What's not so nice about this particular live recording is that there is applause - after the 1st movement !!! Why they didn't edit this out I will never know.

Thomas

It's strange, but there is also applause after the first movement in the 1947 Heifetz recording (New York). Must be something about the first movement of the Korngold violin concerto. But it is usually fairly simple to edit these things out (unless the applause overlaps the end of the music) and I cannot think why record companies don't do it. I've burned my own copy of the 1947 Heifetz ... senza applause.

Grazioso

There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact. --Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The new erato

Agreed. Recommended by me in a chamber music thread once upon a time.

Guido

#14
That chamber disc is indeed sumptuous - almost all his music is.

Naturally I love the Cello concerto - I wish the film Deception that it derives from was available on DVD. Surely one of the best film scores of all time! I'd love to see that DVD.

It's a great piece for the cello, virtuosic and with beautiful themes, but actually as far as modern concertos go, its quite manageable technically. I think the main reason for its relative neglect is its short length, but I personally have a penchant for single concerto/concertante movements, a category that is severely lacking in the cello repertoire!

There is an absolutely gorgeous miniature for cello and piano that was intended for the film but never made it and was never published. Its very short but its just so ravishing! Maybe I'll record it and put it up here one day (A perfect encore methinks). The direction at the start of the score is 'With great heartness' - touchingly naive.
Geologist.

The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away

tjguitar

QuoteI wish the film Deception that it derives from was available on CD.

Bill Stromberg and the Moscow Symphony recorded it along with Sea Hawk:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000Q6ZUVM

Guido

sorry I meant DVD! Thanks for the tip though - its coming out on my Birthday - Might just have to treat myself)
Geologist.

The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away

Sergeant Rock

Quote from: erato on May 21, 2007, 04:40:44 AM
Agreed. Recommended by me in a chamber music thread once upon a time.

Yes, recommended by you and subsequently bought by me. Thank you.

Sarge
the phone rings and somebody says,
"hey, they made a movie about
Mahler, you ought to go see it.
he was as f*cked-up as you are."
                               --Charles Bukowski, "Mahler"

sound67

Quote from: tjguitar on May 20, 2007, 09:14:36 PM


Can't wait for this.  May 29th release date in the UK, some sound clips at screenarchives.com :)

Bought this one last week. I already got all the other re-recordings of selections from "The Sea Hawk", by Charles Gerhardt, Varujan Koijan, James de Preist (8 minutes only) and André Previn, respectively, and sadly I must report that while the new version is welcome for being complete, it is all too obviously the weakest in terms of both performance and recorded sound.

The trouble begins with the dullest recording of the Main Titles imaginable. Stromberg's reading here lacks any of the "schwung" this fanfare demands and that is best captured by Kojian as part of his 45-min Utah Symphony recording. The brass from Moscow sound limp and defensive not just here, but in many places. Things improve after that, with some sensitive playing especially in the lyrical or atmospheric (Panama) sequences. However, the Moscow forces cannot swash nor buckle with the best orchestras from England or the US.

Why Stromberg/Morgan chose to hire a Russian soprano (Irina Romishevskaya) for the short but beautiful Dona Maria's song, other than because of easy availability, is a mystery. She sings the ballad with the most inappropriate Russian accent, and with none of the required sensitivity. Even in comparison to Carol Wetzel's small-voiced but sweet and sensitive take on this song in the Kojian recording, Romishevskaya is totally unacceptable. Mind though, we're talking here of just under a minute of Naxos' 115minute reading of The Sea Hawk.

The Moscow Chorus do better in "Strike for the Shores of Dover", but again are no match for the London singers in Gerhardt's recording or the Utah Symphony Chorus (for reasons unknown, Previn chose to replace the chorus with a brass section carrying the theme in his LSO recording).

A word on sound: The Prelude alarmed me because of a rather cavernous and mushy sound that cannot be the state of the art today even in Moscow, but it gets better from track 2 on. However, solo instruments are frequently spotlighted in the way movie soundtracks are being recorded, which is true to these producers' expressed aim to make film music sound as intended and not as "ersatz symphonic music" - resulting in a balance that is clear but never natural. While this policy made a lot of sense in many of Morgan/Stromberg's earlier recordings, like the film music of Roy Webb, Hans Salter etc., it is highly questionable here. Erich Wolfgang Korngold made no distinction between concert and film music, and his orchestration here (except compromises with regard to the size of the Warner Bros Orchestra) does not differ from his concert music. It should IMHO be recorded ike concert music.

The notes on the scores are, predictably, splendid, and with one exception Brendan Carroll (the president of the Korngold Society) this time refrains from hyperbole when referring to Korngold's importance in the history of film music - in his notes for the Previn Sea Hawk CD he erroneously credited Korngold having singlehandedly reinvented Hollywood film music.

A slightly disappointing release then as far as The Sea Hawk is concerned (the twofer also contains a 30-minute suite of Korngold's Deception score, including the shorter film version of the Cello Concerto, which also gets a rather pedestrian treatment by soloist Alexander Zagorinsky), which is valuable for its completeness, but falls short occasionally in the "perfomance department". If you want a CD of most of the substantial music from THE SEA HAWK, go with Varese Sarabande's clearly superior Utah Symphony Orchestra version of 1987. If you need the highlights only, but shown to the greatest possible advantage, try and hunt down the RCA suites conducted by Charles Gerhardt and recorded by the best classical recording engineer of them all, Decca's Ken J. Wilkinson.

Thomas
"Vivaldi didn't compose 500 concertos. He composed the same concerto 500 times" - Igor Stravinsky

"Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours." - Norman Lebrecht

tjguitar

Thanks for the review Thomas.  I too love the Varese recording, but it is sadly out of print.


I will be picking this up when it is released in the US (July 31st)

Also there is a semi-complete Chandos recording supposedly on the way, not sure what they cut out but it is going to fit on one CD.