A hole in the Hungarian heart
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
Over tea in the mid-1980s, not long after he suffered a stroke, Miklos Rozsa expressed mild regret to me that his concert music never achieved the appeal of his film scores for The Jungle Book, Ben Hur and Julius Caesar. It was a lament I heard from many film composers but none so wistfully as Rozsa, who believed that the quality of his music in both genres was equally high and accepted that its posterity was not for him to decide….
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
Thanks for the tip about this album.
I don’t know about all of Rozsa’s non-film music, but the Violin Concerto is IMHO every bit the equal of the Korngold, which is now standard rep (they would seem to make an ideal CD pairing). It would seem a natural for the likes of Joshua Bell, Gil Shaham, or Hillary Hahn. Its rare performances often seem to be done by concertmasters, and are just one-offs.
I don’t know the Cello Concerto very well but surely it could take the place occasionally of the Haydn pair, Elgar, or Schumann (there’s also wonderful and neglected cello concertos by Virgil Thompson, Peter Mennin, Gerald Finzi, Victor Herbert, and others).
The Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Cello would also be a refreshing substitute for the Brahms Double.
These are all pieces that few might buy tickets specifically to hear, but few would object to actually hearing them.
If you go to YouTube you can hear a fire-breathing performance of his Piano Concerto with Leonard Pennario playing the solo part.
It’s nice that Capriccio has started to record Rozsa. The underappreciated and neglected conductor James Sedares promoted his music recording much of it for Koch some thirty years ago. When Sedares was the music director in Phoenix, he gave many memorable and interesting concerts and we got to hear some Rozsa along with other Hollywood greats. I think orchestras everywhere are missing a great opportunity to freshen their repertoire by not programming more music by film composers – and not just the movie stuff, but the concert music like this new disk.
While Rózsa certainly deserved a shelf-full of Oscars, he only won three: for Hitchcock’s “Spellbound,” the Ronald Colman thriller “A Double Life” (also the name of his autobiography, in relation to the divide you cite between his film and concert work), and of course “Ben-Hur.”
My favorites among the concert pieces include “The Vintner’s Daughter” (in its orchestral guise), with its feints toward French Impressionism, the “North Hungarian Peasant Songs and Dances,” for violin and orchestra (originally for violin and piano), which would be nice to hear once in a while as an alternative to Bartók’s “Romanian Folk Dances,” the “Hungarian Nocturne,” and the Concerto for Strings.
The concertos for solo instruments and orchestra are all attractive, with the Violin Concerto, written for Heifetz, deserving to be played, as another commenter has pointed out, as frequently as the Korngold. I was lucky enough to hear the Viola Concerto once with the Philadelphia Orchestra (with then principal violist Roberto Diaz).
I’d say Rózsa is in my top three, or perhaps four, film composers. I’m especially fond of his music for “The Thief of Bagdad,” “Spellbound,” “The King’s Thief,” “Lust for Life,” and, for me, the all-time champ, “Ben-Hur.” I’ve heard just about every one of the film scores that’s been issued commercially, and most in the actual films for which they were written, and they’re all wonderful.
It’s good to see another cycle of his orchestral works under way. I already have multiple recordings of most of them, but I hope this one gains wider exposure and earns more friends for the composer.
Also of interest might be a series of recordings on the Naxos label of concert works by Eugene Zador, who for many years worked with Rózsa as an orchestrator on his film scores.
Don’t miss this concert then in Dresden at the Dresden Music Festival on 28 May featuring the Rozsa Sinfonia concertante!
https://www.dso-berlin.de/de/konzert/rakitina-hope-vogler-dresden-28-05-2024/#