The Inventor Of A Genre

An album celebrating the early art of film music. Titled Previn Conducts Korngold, it features compositions by Korngold for several movies, namely The Sea Hawk, Captain Blood, The Prince and the Pauper and Elizabeth and Essex. The ensemble being conducted by Andre Previn is the London Symphony Orchestra, film music veterans themselves as an institution. The movies for which these scores were written date from 1935 to 1940 when "talkies" were still pretty much in their infancy and the group of emigre central European composers who inhabited Hollywood ( many on the run from the Nazis ) more or less invented the film music genre. Korngold was maybe the most prominent of them and the late romanticism of much of his writing fitted these swashbucklers and historical epics like a glove. Korngold himself called then operas without singing and there is much that is similar to the tone poem style of Strauss for instance. His music may sound typically Hollywood but only because he invented typical Hollywood. As Previn states, Korngold's music didn't change from that which he was writing back in Vienna, it was just that the lushness of his harmonies and his extraordinary orchestrations lent themselves o motion pictures. Sadly, in his later life I suspect that Korngold would have swapped some of his wordly success for a few more critical kudos.