Film Score Monthly has released the long-awaited reissue of the late Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Collection in a 12-CD boxed set. Produced by FSM publisher Lukas Kendall, the package features Bernstein’s now classic 1970s LP rerecordings of eighteen film scores by eight renowned composers—Bernstein, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, Alex North, Miklos Rozsa, Max Steiner, and Franz Waxman—and spans more than three decades of cinema. The nineteenth film, Kings of the Sun, is an unreleased 2003 recording with Bernstein conducting his own score.
The Tiomkin disc boasts four classic scores from the 1950s that were originally issued on two LPs in 1978 and 1979.
Twenty-one tracks, from Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The High and the Mighty (1954), Land of the Pharaohs (1955), and Search for Paradise (1957), add up to more than an hour of music. Bernstein conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, with baritone soloist Bruce Ogston. The scores for these recordings were reconstructed by Christopher Palmer, who also wrote the original liner notes. These session recordings were later discarded by the recording studio. Despite the diligence of preservation advocacy organizations such as the Film Music Society (of which Bernstein served as president for several years) to foster, with some success, greater awareness among film studios of the valuable assets they hold, the battle for film music preservation remains an ongoing one. For this boxed set, the Tiomkin scores and some of the other music was mastered from sealed and unplayed vinyl LPs provided by the Bernstein estate.
When it comes to film music and soundtracks, a handful of boxed sets in the CD format stand out, among them Academy Award Winning Songs (Rhino), Bernard Herrmann: The Concert Suites (Masters Film Music), Classic Disney (Walt Disney Records), Classic M-G-M Film Scores, 1935-1965 (Rhino), Erich Wolfgang Korngold: The Warner Bros. Years (Rhino), A Fistful of Film Music: The Ennio Morricone Anthology (Rhino), In Session: A Film Music Celebration (Varese Sarabande), Jerry Goldsmith at 20th Century Fox (Varese Sarabande), Jerry Goldsmith: 40 Years of Film Music (Silva Screen), and The Star Wars Trilogy (Fox). Since the advent of the CD format, perhaps less than 100 boxed sets have been devoted to film music, typically in anthology form and devoted to a single artist or theme. The Film Music Collection is in a league of its own, not only because of the sheer number of discs, but because its theme is simply great film music. The playlist was selected by the esteemed Elmer Bernstein himself, and the boxed set includes a beautifully produced 136-page hardcover book with new contributions from film author Jon Burlingame, writer Jay Alan Quantrill, Lukas Kendall, and soundtrack producer James Fitzpatrick. The original liner notes have been reproduced in the book, often with notated music examples of themes or motives. Bernstein hired some of that generation’s most astute writers on the subject, including Christopher Palmer, Fred Steiner, and Win Sharples Jr.
Bernstein’s Film Music Collection was extraordinary in more ways than one. Lacking corporate sponsorship, it was self-financed by Bernstein, one of the first to make film music directly accessible to the fan base via mail order in the days before the voluminous catalogs of Varese Sarabande, Film Score Monthly, and other soundtrack specialty labels. An early advocate for the reconstruction of film scores from their original sketches and scores, Bernstein helped pave the way for a generation of film music rerecordings. Through the Film Music Collection, he sought to produce LPs that would faithfully reproduce original scores by recording those cues that would best represent a film and stand on their own. In doing so, he influenced many who worked with and for him, including orchestrators Christopher Palmer and Patrick Russ.
Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Collection is priced US$200 at www.screenarchives.com.
Check out the sample tracks on that site; half a dozen for Tiomkin alone.
Three worthwhile articles on Tiomkin—Christopher Palmer’s “Dimitri Tiomkin: A Biographical Sketch” and “Tiomkin as Russian Composer,” and William Rosar’s “Lost Horizon: An Account of the Composition of the Score”—are featured in the final issue of Film Music Notebook, a journal published by Bernstein and distributed concurrently with the original Film Music Collection LPs. All issues of this unique publication, which feature one-of-a-kind interviews by Bernstein of the various composers, have been reprinted and bound into a 579-page hardcover, Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974–1978, available for purchase from the Film Music Society. Visit: www.filmmusicsociety.org.