1 DECEMBER 1973, Page 23

Records

Pure Korn

Rodney Milnes,

christmas, I am reliably Informed, Is coming, so allow me to commend to your notice, not altogether light-heartedly, a record of either the best bad music or the worst good music I have heard this year. It is a selection from the film scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold under the title of The Sea Hawk (RCA SER 5664, £2.49). Born in 1897, Korngold was a Viennese child prodigy, His stage Works were performed at . the State Opera while he was still in his teens, his orchestral pieces Were conducted by such maestros as Klemperer, Walter and Furtwangler, his violin concerto was recorded by Heifitz, and his most famous opera, Die tote Stadt (1920) was a favourite vehicle for such prima donnas as Jeritza and Lehmann. Reinhardt invited him to Hollywood to adapt Mendelssohn's score for the movie of 14 Midsummer Night's Dream in 1934, and four years later he refused an offer to return to the film capital until the looming Ansch

luss led him prudently to change his mind. From then on he composed music for seventeen Warner Brothers films, many of them Errol Flynn swashbucklers or Bette Davis weenies. He died in 1957.

As a genre, film music is not to be despised. Walton, Britten, Prokofiev, Maxwell Davies, Richard Rodney Bennett and Don Banks have all indulged, not to mention all those full-time professionals of varying talents. It performs the same dramatic function as melodram in the nineteenth-century opera and drama, and if the composer knows what he is about, performs it very well. Most critics, I fear, would dismiss Korngold's big, brassy, opulent scores as derivative rubbish, derivative, that is, of Puccini and Strauss. Maybe they are, but there are worse composers from whom to derive, and what magnificent rubbish they are. His soaring melodies are instantly memorable, modulate intoxicatingly, and seldom lack rhythmic interest. Above all, they are highly dramatic, and must have worked wonders for the movies ,they accompanied, few of which are in any sane cineaste's top ten.

Some of the items newly recorded here are too short to make much impact, but the symphonic tone poem ' Tomorrow ' from The Constant Nymph (1943), performed by Norma Procter, no less, and the Ambrosian Singers, is pretty meaty stuff, and the extract from Anthony Adverse (1936), which won him his first Oscar, is entitled 'No Father, No Mother, No Name,' accompanies the child from his mother's death bed through a snowstorm to the convent where he is to be raised by nuns, and can have left not a dry eye in the picture palace. The orchestra Is the National Philharmonic of London (i.e. a pick-up band of top-flight session players from our five orchestras) and the conductor clearly knows how this sort of music should go. The ;stereo sound is absolutely smashing. The record is obviously not everyone's cup of molasses, but sample the first two tracks, from Errol Flynn's The Sea Hawk — which, as water music, beats the Khachaturian looted for Onedin Line into an admiral's hat — and

the swoony 1945 remake of Of Human Bondage. If you end up

chewing the listening booth carpet, all well and good, if not — well, sorry you were bothered, and back to Bruckner.

Kurt Weill was another of HitIler's gifts to the US, but a composer of quite a different mould. For anyone seeking to make Mr Heath's Christmas absolutely Weill, a gift to him of the re-issue on CBS of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (77346, £4.72) should fill the bill; Brecht's imaginary but only-too-familiar laissezfaire society collapses amidst pro test demonstrations against " massive inflation."

The performance is not quite ideal, with Lotte Lenya idiomatically growling most of the heroine's role an octave below pitch in her inimitable baritone, and a tenor who refuses to sing at any dynamic below forte. But Gisela Litz is a superb Begbick — her crooning of the brothel scene is an object lesson in how to put Weill . across — and the rest of the cast is competent. Wilhelm BrUcknerRtiggeberg handles the score with brilliant clarity, and the recording, although dating from the late '50s, comes up freshly in fairly convincing stereo. And there is little likelihood of a new version of one of the few successful political operas. The booklet, printed in France, manages to misprint both the title of the opera and the name of the conductor. More seriously, no text is included.