Benjamin Frankel
      Movie Music

* Music from The Importance of Being Earnest, Curse of the Werewolf, The
Night of the Iguana, Trottie True, The Years Between, Footsteps in the Fog

Queensland Symphony Orchestra/Werner Andreas Albert.
CPO 999 809-2  TT: 67:13

Summary for the Busy Executive: Popcorn and pate'.

British composer Benjamin Frankel is probably best known for his violin
concerto and for a powerful cycle of eight symphonies, most written toward
the end of his life.  Frankel was born into the British working class (or
shabby-genteel lower middle class -- depends on your point of view) and
was apprenticed at a young age to a watchmaker.  The odds against his
becoming a composer were huge; the odds against him making a living at
it even huger.  Nevertheless, he caught a very lucky break and managed
to learn the violin.  In the Twenties, still in his teens, he worked in
fairly good dance bands, including Henry Hall's BBC band, as a violinist
and arranger.  He became music director for top West End shows and in the
Thirties began to score movies.  Simultaneously, he turned out orchestral
and chamber works.  CPO's biographical notes are a bit sketchy.  They don't
say anything not true, but they do leave out a lot.  Frankel was an
enthusiastic member of the British far left and in the Fifties started
to get into trouble for it, not so much among the centrist establishment,
but from in-fighting among those who had left the Communist Party over the
Czech purge trials and those who would eventually leave the Party over the
Hungarian uprising -- pretty much the final straw for those who had turned
to Soviet Communism as a humane alternative to rapacious capitalism.  He
left Britain for Switzerland in the late Fifties, although he died in
London in 1973.

Here we have some of Frankel's most ingratiating and effective film music.
Film music only relatively recently has begun to garner some respect among
the studios that commissioned it.  Many very important scores have been
lost -- destroyed, in most cases, by the studios who neither wanted to
return it to the composers (the studios had, after all, paid for it) nor
bear the cost of storage.  Vaughan Williams and Walton were exceptions.
They had the clout to stipulate in their contracts that a studio had to
return their scores to them.  As a result, we have Vaughan Williams's
seventh symphony and Walton's Spitfire Prelude and Fugue and Shakespearean
suites.  The studio reasoning went that, after all, the music was preserved
on the soundtrack, never thinking that the films themselves might become
lost or so degraded that retrieving the music became impossible.
Consequently, we have very little of Frankel's film music.  He did keep
copies of a few scores -- fortunately, his more ambitious.  Sometimes the
arranger, E. D. Kennaway had to listen to the soundtrack or work from
piano scores.

It's worth noting that putting movie music out on this kind of CD usually
involves arranging.  We don't normally hear the pure soundtrack.  The movie
composer usually writes little snips of music, almost none of them more
than a minute long.  Except for opening and closing credits, he rarely has
a chance at anything longer.  Thus, the "suites" we hear on soundtrack
albums and on CDs like this one come into existence because someone,
usually not the composer, has stitched the scraps together.  This is true
for every score on this CD, with the exception of the one for John Huston's
Night of the Iguana, although even here Kennaway provided a two-note
cadence at the end of one sequence.

The CD reveals Frankel as at least a fine craftsman.  I've never been
a fan of the movie The Importance of Being Earnest, despite the presence
of the delectable Joan Greenwood as Gwendolyn.  It moves far too heavily.
Perhaps the absence of a live audience played hell with the actors' timing.
The music works well in the film, but you can't call it memorable, in
the sense that you can almost any score by Korngold, Herrmann, or Rozsa.
Trottie True, a film I've never seen, on the life and loves of a Gaiety
Girl works the same vein as Earnest far more successfully, with
rumpty-tumpty, Sullivanesque tunes ingratiating themselves into your
musical soul as sweet as sin.  For Curse of the Werewolf, a Hammer horror
film, Frankel provided a score much better than it had to be.  It was,
according to the notes, the first British film score written mostly in
dodecaphonic serialism.  In the movie, it's appropriately creepy.  The
sequence selected for the CD, however, "Pastoral," effectively mixes Mahler
birdsong and British pastoralism.  Here and there, it reminded me of
Bernard Herrmann at his most relaxed.  Footsteps in the Fog is one of
my favorite British films.  Starring Jean Simmons (as a conniving little
psychopath) and Stewart Granger (as a cad who has poisoned his wife), the
movie explores an extremely troubling co-dependency.  The music rides these
psychological undercurrents with great style and great insight.  I worried
a little that the score might not hold up on its own, but I needn't have
bothered.  Kennaway has done a beautiful job of reconstruction.

The most elaborate representation on the CD consists of Frankel's music
for Night of the Iguana, one of the few scores Frankel actually kept.  For
my money, the movie is pretentious -- worse, old-fashioned pretentious --
hokum.  Iguana may be the worst movie John Huston (though not its star,
Richard Burton) ever made, entirely due to the awful Tennessee Williams
play on which it's based.  Frankel's music, on the other hand, is
wonderful, and Huston gives him many opportunities to build extended
paragraphs.  This is my favorite sequence on the CD -- emotionally rich
and, at the same time, concisely written.

Albert and the Queensland do all right, although sometimes you hear
something rhythmically lax or tonally raw.  Albert nevertheless manages to
keep the big picture, so to speak, constantly in view.  The sound is a bit
bright for my taste, but still acceptable.  Some people actually want to
hear more highs than lows.

Steve Schwartz