It may sound overblown, or even downright silly, to say this about what is really a sampler album, but the two-CD
British Film Classics is a wonder, in scope and quality, one of the finest
soundtrack anthologies devoted to its subject. That's not too surprising, however, as it comes from
Chandos Records, a label that has gone out of its way in recent years to record an extraordinary amount of classic material in the vintage
soundtrack field. Opening up with
Ron Goodwin's glorious, sweeping main title theme from
Sidney Hayers'
The Trap (1966), the disc takes us backward 30 years to the dawn of classically structured British
soundtracks with
Sir Arthur Bliss' march from
William Cameron Menzies'
Things to Come (1936), then ahead to the 1940s and
Alan Rawsthorne's charming, elegant
"Valse Caprice" from
Uncle Silas (1947).
Sir William Walton's
"Prelude" from
Hamlet is represented with far bolder, more emphatic playing than one is accustomed to hearing -- one of the virtues of the
Chandos recordings of these scores is that the conductors and orchestras aren't afraid to play the music with a lot of fire and passion where it's called for, representing virtually all of the music in its most compelling form. This is also an unusually generous sampler in that it contains the entire suite from
Richard Rodney Bennett's score from
Murder on the Orient Express (1974) -- the real secret of its appeal, however, beyond that generosity, is the way that the programming leaps around through the obvious, such as
Eric Coates'
"Dambusters March" to unexpected territory, such as the
waltz and
rhumba from
William Alwyn's score for
In Search of the Castaways;
Alwyn was a major 20th century British composer, and did a lot of film work in between his concert music, but few remember that he composed for
Disney.
Malcolm Arnold's jaunty, comedic main title theme from
The Belles of St. Trinian's (1954) is a great mood-breaker, one of the funniest pieces of movie music that this writer has ever heard and, with its ridiculously amplified percussion, a bridge between
Leroy Anderson's
"The Syncopated Clock" (aka the theme from
The Late Late Show) and
Vic Mizzy's music for
The Addams Family. Taking us from that, back to
Vaughan Williams' serious, stately, and gorgeous
"Dawn Patrol" theme from
Coastal Command makes an even better contrast -- and we get the complete
Warsaw Concerto by
Richard Addinsell, plus
Georges Auric's
waltz from
Moulin Rouge (1952) (sung beautifully by
Mary Carewe). Disc two follows a similar pattern, ranging between international epics of British origin (at least, for the music), though one might quibble over the inclusion of the excerpt from the
Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 from
Brief Encounter -- it's a British film, but the music is much better known today from subsequent movies such as
The Seven-Year Itch. More explicable is the presence of
Richard Rodney Bennett's music for the love scene from
Four Weddings and a Funeral, a reminder that serious, world-class English composers are still very much with us in the present day. As an added bonus, all of these recordings from the
Chandos library have been upgraded to state-of-the-art 24-bit digital audio, from their original 16-bit digital masters. ~ Bruce Eder
