October 2006
Web site maintenance

Due to the popularity and increasing use of this site, we are in the process of restructuring the content to better handle usage, including search and display.

During this time, we are unable to post any new content. We apologize for the temporary inconvenience. Upon completion, the site will be better suited to handle traffic, particularly in the archive database, and will offer increased functionality and ease of use. Check back soon for more articles and images—including spectacular poster art in the Photo Gallery—and thank you for your continued support.

September 2006
Albertina Rasch

Albertina Rasch, the wife of Dimitri Tiomkin from 1926 until her death in 1967, had an enviable career in dance, as a ballerina, choreographer, and teacher. The teenage premiere danseuse wowed Viennese concert hall audiences with her Classical ballet performances; however, fame came in the United States where she embraced vaudeville before moving into Broadway and motion pictures as a celebrated dance director. As a leading practitioner and advocate of American ballet, her influence on the art of dancing on Broadway and in early sound film musicals came largely through her own ballet troupe, the Albertina Rasch dancers. The "Czarina of Broadway," as she became known was acknowledged in Film Choreographers and Dance Directors (McFarland, 1997) as the first Broadway dance director to use Classical ballet in precision line work. Mme. Rasch was one of the most important and influential dance directors for a period of about fifteen years beginning in the mid-1920s. Learn more about Rasch and her personal and professional connection to Tiomkin. The Albertina Rasch story and photographs are coming soon to these pages.

August 2006
Tiomkin disc featured in Film Music Collection box

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.

A British music industry lawyer and patron of the arts, Charles Levison died last month in London. Early in his career at the law firm of Harbottle & Lewis, Levison provided legal assistance for Tiomkin's film on Tchaikovsky. Later, through the Levison Company, he aided in the publication of Christopher Palmer's Dimitri Tiomkin: A Portrait, and was project coordinator for the compact disc Dimitri Tiomkin: The Film Music with the Royal College of Music Orchestra conducted by Sir David Willcocks. Levison had a lengthy career in the music recording industry, notably with Warners' WEA Records and the Virgin Group, including Virgin Records and Virgin Broadcasting. His obituary can be found at http://www.timesonline.co.uk.

July 2006
Apple iTunes update

We first reported on the availability of online downloads of music by Dimitri Tiomkin from iTunes in May 2003. Since that time, there has been a substantial increase in the amount and variety of song and score material for MP3 players, such as the phenomenally popular iPod. The Apple iTunes Music Store now lists some 100 songs by Tiomkin that, if downloaded, would take a whopping 5.5 hours to listen to. Tiomkin's output for Westerns is disproportionately represented on iTunes, a reflection perhaps of popular interest and availability, since much of the content is in the form of cover versions of songs or rerecordings of soundtracks. The entire Marco Polo Film Music Classics CD of the score for Red River—mentioned in our March 2005 news—is available for purchase, along with a smorgasbord of material ranging from The Alamo to Wild Is the Wind. A suite from The Men, selections from Alfred Hitchcock films, and the main title from The Thing are also on the playlist. Among the hard-to-find are tracks from a 1988 Telarc CD (88801) featuring music from It's a Wonderful Life, performed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Newman as part of the short-lived Sundance Institute Film Music Series. Since our last report, iTunes has expanded beyond the Mac OSX world and is fully functional with computers running Windows. And more good news: the price has remained the same, US$0.99 per track.

The new technology is already revolutionizing the music and recording industry. As an invaluable resource and outlet for music, iTunes has many benefits; however, it also has contributed to a growing problem in semantics. In the popular culture, all MP3 tracks have misleadingly come to be called "songs,"regardless of their content. Television composer Dan Foliart (7th Heaven, Roseanne), president of the Society of Composers and Lyricists, in his Summer 2006 column, "Taking Pride in What We Do," for the SCL quarterly The Score, writes that he often has been introduced as a songwriter. Even though he has written songs, Foliart points out that " the way that I have made my living for the last twenty-seven years is as a composer and my output is referred to as cues and underscore."

Tiomkin usually is not branded as a songwriter, even though he wrote music in song form. He wrote close to 200 songs over the course of his career, but this output is dwarfed by the thousands of music cues he composed as dramatic underscore for film. By lumping everything into one category, iTunes implies that even the "Suspense at Dawn" cue from Red River is a "song." Does this matter? Yes; it matters to composers interested in raising awareness of, and recognition for, the film-scoring profession.

Several cell phone ringtones based on Tiomkin's music are now circulating on the Internet. An instrumental arrangement of "Rawhide" can be found by selecting the "Polyphonic" category and searching for "Tiomkin" at www.mp3-search.us/ringtones/en/index.php. The site iFilm provides a link to a downloadable High Noon ringtone. Unfortunately, you have to provide your cell number in order to preview it.

June 2006
Dimitri Tiomkin and Michael Khariton: Duo-Pianists

by Warren M. Sherk

Were it not for his friendship with the Russian pianist Michael Khariton, Dimitri Tiomkin's career might have taken an entirely different path. Why, then, in his autobiography did Tiomkin conceal his former roommate's identity, referring to him only as "Raskov"? Tiomkin devotes a dozen or more pages to Raskov and their parallel trajectories as pianists in St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, and finally the United States.

It was Raskov who, lured by the promise of golden opportunities, convinced Tiomkin they should leave Berlin for Paris. (Raskov financed the trip, which probably made Tiomkin's decision easier.) In Berlin, the two had performed together at parties until they decamped to the City of Light. In Paris, their partnership as a Russian piano duo flourished, eventually drawing the attention of Broadway theater magnate Morris Gest. A fellow Russian immigrant, Gest offered the pair a contract for a fourteen-week tour accompanying a ballet troupe on a principal vaudeville circuit in the United States. The resulting American tour turned out to be a major turning point in Tiomkin's life.

The earliest documented public performance by the piano duo took place in Paris in May 1924, and they were billed as Michel Khariton and Dimitri Tiomkine. After warming up with Zinding's "Variations," they launched into Rachmaninoff's Suite no. 2, a staple of the two-piano repertoire since its publication in 1901. Pianist Lea Lubochitz performed three solo numbers before the headliners returned to play a Chopin waltz arranged by Tiomkin for himself and Khariton. (Incidentally, years later in Los Angeles Tiomkin performed a Chopin duet with the famed pianist Max Rabinovitch during a radio broadcast.) A rendition of Debussy's "Arabesque" concluded the program.

In addition to performing published works for two pianos, Tiomkin took on the task of arranging custom two-piano four-hand arrangements, either by adapting solo piano pieces such as the Chopin waltz, or by reducing orchestral works. As Tiomkin relates in his autobiography, "In these I took care to give Raskov the rhythmic fortissimi and reserve[d] the quiet lyrical passages for myself." Although he characterized Raskov's playing as crude, Tiomkin did admire his partner's powerful style for the resonance it bestowed upon their duets.

By June 1924, Tiomkin and Khariton's star was rising; they were now performing at the Maison Gaveau with seventy musicians under the baton of Vladimir Goldschmann. Each pianist soloed with the orchestra, Tiomkin for Liszt's Concerto in A Major, and Khariton on Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto  no 1. The program concluded with an authentic Russian performance of Rachmaninoff's Suite no. 2.

Once they were on American soil and under contract to Gest, Tiomkin and Khariton's first U.S. appearance was at B. F. Keith's Theatre in Washington, D.C., the last week of December 1925. The pianists accompanied dancers Albertina Rasch, a pre–Ziegfeld Follies Jacques Cartier, and eight Albertina Rasch Girls. The 1,800-seat theater was built specifically for vaudeville in 1912. In January Tiomkin and Khariton joined Rasch and her ballet troupe on the Keith-Albee theater circuit, the "Standard of the World," with venues in Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Gest had told Tiomkin that Americans need a gimmick—after all, the pianists were competing for the audience's attention with, among others, animals, skaters, and equilibrists—so, following his benefactor's lead, Tiomkin had "two pianos built into one" and featured it in the act. When the 3,000-seat Stanley Theatre, a regional center for operas and movies located on Market Street in Philadelphia, celebrated its fifth anniversary in January 1926, Tiomkin and Khariton were there with Albertina Rasch. One reviewer wrote that the pianists "displayed superior technique and ability in their duets and individual solos."

Lavish celebrations such as the one at the Stanley were common during the Roaring '20s. The grand vaudeville era was coming to an end, as were the days of silent film. In New York City, they were determined to make the most of both worlds. Live stage shows, with variety acts featuring the best vaudeville had to offer, began preceding the screenings of the films. When Just Suppose premiered at the Mark Strand Theater in January 1926, New Yorkers were in for a treat. After a "Jazz Rhapsody" overture, the New Mark Strand Frolics wiggled, the "Cigarette Girls" amazed, and the divertissement? "Pompadour Days." And if that wasn't enough, ladies and gentlemen, a nice round of applause for…the Dimitri Tiomkin and Michel Khariton duet. Their repertoire that day included Chopin's "Polonaise" in A Flat Minor and Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor, both arranged for two pianos by Tiomkin. For the Chopin, Tiomkin once again assigned himself the poetic, singing melodies, and utilized Khariton's "iron wrists for the principal theme and [his] fingers of steel for the repeated downward four-note scale passages." When the film itself finally unspooled onto the screen, audiences witnessed actor Richard Barthelmess, at the height of his immense popularity, in a story suspiciously similar to that of Coming to America, the 1988 film directed by John Landis and starring Eddie Murphy. (In Just Suppose, Barthelmess plays the prince of an imaginary kingdom who comes to New York and falls in love with an American girl.)

From the beginning, Khariton was less than thrilled about playing second fiddle to Rasch, and Tiomkin relates there was artistic and personal friction between the two. As Tiomkin's professional relationship with Rasch grew more intimate, this in turn strained his friendship with Khariton. The last straw for Khariton may have come in March 1926, when the two pianists were billed as "The Tiomkin Duo" in the program for Rasch's Music Roll ballet. Regardless, the contract with Gest was set to expire at the end of March and was not extended. The money was good, but the vaudeville schedule­—three performances a day, four on Saturday—was grueling. Tiomkin, wishing to return to the concert hall as a piano soloist, decided to strike out on his own, and he and Khariton parted ways sometime between March and May 1926. Tiomkin and Rasch wed in May. That same month, pianist Georg Davidoss joined Tiomkin at the second piano for the Rasch-choreographed ballet performance of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue at the Hippodrome.

In March 1926 Khariton performed solo as an intermission guest in a Morris Gest-sponsored radio broadcast featuring the Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio in New York. After he split with Tiomkin, Khariton was often heard on radio playing works by Chopin, Albeniz, Debussy, and Mendelssohn. By April 1929 Khariton had apparently formed a new relationship with pianist Vladimir Brenner, and the new "Khariton Duo" provided accompaniment at Ted Shawn's Carnegie Hall recital. The only surviving musical performances by Khariton can be found on a couple of piano rolls he cut for Duo-Art. By the early 1930s the pianist was relegated to performing at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York. He then headed West, where unfortunately he ended up in the Los Angeles County Jail in October 1936, charged with being in the United States illegally. He allegedly had overstayed his leave on his first visit to the States and, after first fleeing to Canada, was arrested upon returning to Los Angeles.

Tiomkin entertained his old friend in true Hollywood style when, sometime in early 1937, the former dueling pianists spent an evening at the notorious Clover Club on the Sunset Strip. Khariton, interested in working for Tiomkin at the film studios, followed up the meeting with phone calls that apparently went unreturned, as Tiomkin was out of town. Khariton's personal life was in flux. He had just received divorce papers from his first wife and learned that the Immigration Department had granted him, through contacts in Israel, permission to stay in the country. Tiomkin received this news in a May 1937 letter from Khariton written in Russian on stationery from the Hotel El Tejon. It is possible that the hotel, the largest in Bakersfield, California, may have offered Khariton room and board in exchange for playing piano. In the letter, he expresses concern that he has not made a single dollar in seventeen months (a far cry from the "good old days" in Berlin, when he grew rich from speculative endeavors unrelated to music, not to mention the $2,000 per week he and Tiomkin earned during their vaudeville tour). All he has left, he writes, is an estranged wife, Israel, and his music, which he practices on the piano four to five hours a day. The once successful pianist, who recognized Tiomkin's talent early on and was steadfastly enthusiastic about his friend's future prospects, was now reduced to pleading for work. Tiomkin had just finished Lost Horizon, and Khariton, having read in the trade paper Variety that Tiomkin was being tapped for a new film, asks his "friend" and "brother"for a helping hand.

After 1937, the trail grows cold. Khariton was killed in a "street accident" in Philadelphia some time prior to 1959; his death is mentioned in Tiomkin's memoir, published that year. Did his much publicized arrest—the Los Angeles Times headline read "Russian Pianist Held on Charge of Illegal Entry"—influence Tiomkin's decision to seek citizenship the following year? And was Khariton working under the assumed name of Armand Faure in California during the time of his immigration troubles, as the letter to Tiomkin may indicate? Could "Raskov" have been a nickname? Why Tiomkin refers to his dear friend by another name remains unclear. In any event, were it not for Khariton's tenacity, Tiomkin may not have traveled to Paris as he did, which in turn set in motion his move to the United States and his career path from concert pianist to film composer.

© 2006 Volta Music

Sources

• The Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at the University of Southern California (thanks to Ned Comstock)
• The Los Angeles Times and New York Times, accessed through ProQuest
• Please Don't Hate Me by Dimitri Tiomkin and Prosper Buranelli (Doubleday, 1959)

May 2006
Dimitri Tiomkin's score for Resurrection (1931)

Seventy-five years ago, the art of music scoring for Hollywood sound films, or "talkies," was literally being invented by a group of transplanted New Yorkers, many of whom were songwriters. Among them was a Russian concert pianist-turned-composer who was ready to take a stab at writing serious music for films. To read the story of Tiomkin's first feature-length film score, click here.

April 2006
Remembering Gene Pitney, 1941-2006

Singer-songwriter Gene Pitney, the former teen idol who performed Dimitri Tiomkin's title song for the film Town Without Pity, died unexpectedly on April 5 in Wales. Just the night before, he had performed in concert in Cardiff.

Pitney regularly concertized in England, Europe, and Australia, where his fan base remained loyal and strong for more than forty years. Born Gene Francis Allan Pitney in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1941, his Top 40 recording of "(I Wanna) Love My Life Away" in 1961 jump-started his pop music career. The tenor, affectionately known as "rock's Caruso," went on to record a number of hits written by Burt Bacharach and Hal David and enjoyed some success himself as a songwriter. "He's a Rebel" and "Hello Mary Lou" are among his best known, the latter reaching No. 9 on the Billboard charts in May of 1961. Over the next four years, more than a dozen of his records landed on the Top 40 chart, making him one of the most successful solo male vocalists in America. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

In March 2006, Olivia Tiomkin Douglas had the pleasure of attending a Pitney concert in Salisbury. The capacity crowd of adoring fans rewarded him with a standing ovation, and Pitney returned the gesture with a warm handshake for everyone he could reach from the stage. Visiting backstage with him after the concert, Tiomkin Douglas learned that the Town Without Pity title song recording session started at seven o'clock in the evening and continued into the early morning without one successful take. By three A.M., Pitney recalled, his strained voice had become increasingly noticeable in a particular take. An excited Tiomkin blurted out, "That's it! That's the quality I want!" After the film was released, a perceptive film critic even commented on Pitney's "laryngitic voice."

That Pitney came to record "Town Without Pity" was likely the result of his relationship with the newly formed Musicor label, a division of United Artists, the film's releasing company. Musicor had already released "(I Wanna) Love My Life Away" and "Take Me Tonight." "Town Without Pity" (Musicor 1009), his third single, was recorded before his next hit, "Every Breath I Take," but released after. The latter, produced in association with the legendary Phil Spector, is an early example of the "Wall of Sound," the now famous effect created by Spector's groundbreaking production techniques.

Produced and directed by Gottfried Reinhardt (son of the director Max Reinhardt), Town Without Pity was a coproduction between the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. Its running time was 112 minutes at the film's premiere in Germany in March 1961. It screened in New York City six months later and seven minutes shorter. Both the delay and the truncated running time were due to objections from the Production Code Administration over the film's subject matter and dialogue. Within a month of the film's general U.S. release on October 10, Pitney's single was No. 88 on the charts. By the end of the year it was at No. 36, and peaked at No. 13 in 1962.

Tiomkin was scheduled to attend a screening of the film—arranged especially for Academy members in hopes of snagging an Oscar nomination for lead actor Kirk Douglas—at the Directors Guild in Los Angeles on January 26, 1962. It is unclear whether Tiomkin actually attended, because a few days later he was in London meeting with the producer Carl Foreman about The Guns of Navarone. When the Academy Award nominations were announced on February 26, however, the film's sole nomination went to the song "Town Without Pity," by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington.

The following month, at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association banquet at the Beverly Hilton, Tiomkin was indeed in attendance, accepting a Best Original Score Golden Globe for The Guns of Navarone and a special honorary citation for "Town Without Pity." This marked the first time in its nineteen-year history that the Hollywood Foreign Press had acknowledged a song from a motion picture. Two years later, the Press officially created the Best Original Song category and awarded the Golden Globe to none other than…Dimitri Tiomkin, for the title song from the film Circus World, making him the recipient of the first two Golden Globes for Best Song.

Gene Pitney performed "Town Without Pity" at the 34th Annual Academy Awards ceremony on April 9, 1962, backed by a trio of female singers. At 21, he may have been one of the youngest featured singers ever to participate in the show. Henry Mancini's classic "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's took home the gold that night. Ironically, Mancini's song, which generated some two dozen cover versions, capitalized on the theme score concept put into play by Tiomkin with High Noon. As Jeff Smith points out in The Sounds of Commerce: Marketing Popular Film Music, "Dimitri Tiomkin's High Noon (1952) popularized the monothematic or theme score, which organized its melodic and motivic material around a single popular tune rather than a group of leitmotifs."

Town Without Pity is the quintessential monothematic score. In the opening scene, four American soldiers stationed in Germany stroll into a bar. They select a song from the jukebox, and we hear Pitney croon, "When you're young and so in love as we…" The song continues through the scene and the opening credits, ending with the solo lyric, "What a town without pity can do." Part rock, part jazz, part lounge, the memorable theme is then heard in all eighteen orchestral background score cues.

Variety declared the title tune "a superior example of its usually lacklustre breed" with "an astonishingly haunting refrain." Hollywood Reporter noted the tune, "gives an eerie contrapuntal emphasis to the film's unpleasant events," the latter including the rape of a young girl and the subsequent trial of the four GIs. The vocal version of the song is heard once in the film on Douglas's car radio and over the end titles.

Reviews mentioning the film's song and score were generally enthusiastic. Limelight's Len Simpson raved, "Perhaps the outstanding contribution to the entire package lies in the Dimitri Tiomkin music. Tiomkin has taken situations that might normally call for the usual type of mood scoring and has intermingled a haunting melody with a beat that is almost progressive jazz. Another plus is the Tiomkin title song, with lyrics by Ned Washington, which Gene Pitney sings in the picture. Already it has shown signs of becoming a big hit record." Film Daily called the song and music "highly effective."

Not all critics were in agreement. Arthur Knight, in the Saturday Review, felt "Dimitri Tiomkin's blatant score, which sets rock-and-roll ricocheting through the streets of the quiet German town where the movie was made, manages unfailingly to inject Hollywood into the scene whenever it is heard—and his theme song just isn't to be believed." A Los Angeles Times reviewer thought the title tune provided a "weird accompaniment and is repeated interminably throughout the film."

Nevertheless, the tune stuck in moviegoers' minds. Between 1961 and 1971, Musicor included the song on some half-dozen Pitney compilation albums, from The Many Sides of Gene Pitney to World Wide Winners. An Italian-language version, "Citta Spietata," earned him a new legion of fans, and the song also appeared numerous times on the Sequel label in Great Britain. "Town Without Pity" was featured on Original Motion Picture Hit Themes, released by United Artists (LP 6197) in 1963. By the late 1960s it was on its way to becoming a classic when a local Los Angeles radio station included the song in its "Hit Parade '69—The Hits of Today and Yesterday." After the New York Times proclaimed "The Return of Gene Pitney" in 1984, the song popped up in films such as Hairspray and Look Who's Talking. Pitney's only other film song hit was "(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance" in 1962, inspired by but not used in the film of the same name.

"Town Without Pity" will forever be associated with Gene Pitney's memorable vocals. "[It] maybe sold a fifth of some of the other ones," he told the New York Times in 1984, "but it is the one that hung in people's heads. I still close my shows with it." Indeed, that night in Cardiff, at the end of what would be his final concert, Pitney treated the audience to an exuberant rendition of "Town Without Pity."

© 2006 Volta Music

Sources

• The American Film Institute catalog
• The Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at the University of Southern California
• The Core Collection and Production Code Administration files at the Margaret Herrick Library
• Los Angeles Times
• New York Times
• The Daily Telegraph
• www.answers.com
• www.genepitney.com
• www.wikipedia.com

March 2006
Dimitri Tiomkin web site launch party

A launch party for www.dimitritiomkin.com took place at the offices of Greenberg Traurig, LLP at The Water Garden in Santa Monica, California, on October 19, 2005. Olivia Tiomkin Douglas hosted the reception to celebrate the official web site of the renowned composer.

The gathering drew a varied group of archivists, composers, orchestrators, recording artists, and soundtrack specialists, many with a unique connection to the composer's music. The legal representatives of Volta Music Corp. and the Tiomkin music catalog, Jay L. Cooper, Chairman of Greenberg Traurig's Entertainment Department, and Suzie Weston, paralegal, were on hand. Weston introduced designer Gabriel Nordyke, President of www.insightdesigns.com, the creative force behind the site's distinctive and classy look. Nordyke, a designer for the ABC-CLIO web site, says he was "pleased to have the opportunity to work on another project rooted in history, because I believe that our history is what defines us. Coming from a publisher of historical web sites and books, it seemed a perfect opportunity for me to deploy my specific design skills. And it has been a pleasure to collaborate with such a knowledgeable and amicable group to produce this web site dedicated to the life and music of Dimitri Tiomkin." Nordyke collaborated with Patrick Russ and Warren Sherk to ensure that the design could handle the content that includes news, photographs, and a database. Orchestrator Patrick Russ conceived of the site and brought it to fruition thanks to the financial backing of Olivia Tiomkin, with composer/archivist Warren Sherk writing much of the content. David Panzarella, David Brown, John Brockman, and Paul Henning also offered their skills.

Patrick Russ, who orchestrated for Elmer Bernstein, explains, "After the launch of www.elmerbernstein.com I sensed a growing need for official composer sites on the Internet. Olivia was receptive to the idea for Dimitri and we moved ahead. Gabe was looking to branch out on his own and he has done a wonderful job bringing a classic look to the site."

The web site includes news, awards, biography, filmography, photo gallery, and links to soundtrack vendors and archives. A substantial portion of the site can be accessed through the "Archive Search" function. This is a database finding aid for archival material in the Dimitri Tiomkin Collection and the Warner Bros. Archives at the University of Southern California. Among the material to be found are manuscripts, music sketches and scores, orchestra parts, and disc recordings. In addition, information from cue sheets is being entered to aid researchers. A large collection of poster art amassed by Olivia for films scored by her husband will be digitally photographed and added to the site. In addition to posters, the collection contains lobby cards, inserts, and press books.

The reception area and conference room, looking like they were lifted from a hit television series, were well suited to soirée. Several laptop computers connected to the Internet were available for perusing as a large format television projected photographs from the site's photo gallery and the room's built-in audio system played a wide assortment of Tiomkin's music.

Among the guests were James D'Arc, curator of Special Collections Motion Picture Archives, Brigham Young University; record producer Lance Bowling, Cambria Records; composers Peter Boyer and John Brockman; Sol Duran, executor for the Ned Washington estate; Steve Hanson, Cinema-Television Library Director, University of Southern California; concertmaster Paul Henning; Christopher Husted; Volta Music accountants Barry Kelman and Orville Kelman; publisher Lukas Kendall, Film Score Monthly; orchestrators Jon Kull and John Morgan; guitarist Gregg Nestor; composer Jeannie Pool; Dr. Shirley Russ; composer-conductor Bill Stromberg, and his wife, Anna; record producer Robert Townson, Varese Sarabande; singer Jubilant Sykes, and his wife, Cece; composer Christopher Tin, composer and Film Music Society President Christopher Young; and Leslie Zador.

Lisa Edmondson, personal assistant to Henry Mancini and Elmer Bernstein, coordinated the gathering and oversaw the distribution of gift bags at evening's end. Among the goodies offered to departing guests were Christopher Palmer's Dimitri Tiomkin: A Portrait signed by Olivia; recent CDs provided by James Fitzpatrick of Tadlow Music, including The Guns of Navarone and The Alamo: The Essential Dimitri Tiomkin Film Music Collection, and Russian candy.

February 2006
The Men suite set for release by Silva Screen Records

Silva Screen Records' scheduled release of the CD "Music from the Films of Marlon Brando" on March 20, 2006, includes the premiere recording of a suite from Dimitri Tiomkin's score for The Men (1950). The post-war drama, directed by Fred Zinnemann and written by Carl Foreman, stars Brando as a paraplegic dealing with life in a wheelchair and his relationship with his girlfriend, played by Teresa Wright. This new digital recording was produced by James Fitzpatrick, who conducts the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra on the Tiomkin track. Orchestrator Patrick Russ arranged the seven-minute suite from material in the Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at the University of Southern California (USC). The original orchestrators were George Parrish, Herb Taylor, and Paul Marquardt. An instrumental arrangement of the film's theme song, "Love Like Ours," written by Tiomkin with lyrics by Johnny Lehmann, is part of the suite.

Silva Screen has issued a number of actor-themed compact discs. Previous compilations include those for Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, and Sylvester Stallone. "Music from the Classic Films of John Wayne," released in 1994 and also produced by Fitzpatrick, featured Tiomkin's "Prelude" from The High and the Mighty and the "Overture" to The Alamo. The Brando compilation is the latest in this wide-ranging series. In addition to Tiomkin, a pantheon of composers who wrote film music is represented—among them John Barry, Leonard Bernstein, Hugo Friedhofer, Alex North, Nino Rota, Miklós Rózsa, Franz Waxman, and John Williams—comprising a collection of some remarkable film music from the latter half of the 20th century.

In theory, the music from one Brando film to the next is unrelated. Upon closer examination, however, one might wonder: Was Alex North's music near the end of the "Revelation" cue for A Streetcar Named Desire influenced by Tiomkin's chromatic-tinged music for Brando's previous film, The Men? An earlier Brando-themed compilation, "Bernstein's Backgrounds for Brando," was issued on the Dot label in 1958. This was composer Elmer Bernstein's first LP of film music arrangements and included a three-minute track of Tiomkin's theme for The Men. A Blue Moon reissue, "Backgrounds for Brando," made the rounds in 2005 and is currently available from various soundtrack dealers.

The two-disc set "Music from the Films of Marlon Brando" (SILCD1166) can be pre-ordered from Silva Screen.

January 2006
The Film Music Society releases Tiomkin's World War II documentary music

The Film Music Society release of "The World War II Documentary Music of Dimitri Tiomkin" is now available for sale to the general public. The CD contains music from Tunisian Victory, San Pietro, The Negro Soldier, and The Battle of Russia. These four Army orientation and information films were produced by the Capra Unit of the Army Signal Corps in Hollywood from 1942 to 1945. When director Frank Capra asked Tiomkin to join the war effort Tiomkin said, "I want to do duty in war, and what can I do except write notes?" The music was performed by the Army Air Force Orchestra, and includes a track with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in one of its earliest documented film performances.

Tiomkin's participation was important on many levels. He was pleased to return something to the country that had granted him citizenship and he benefited from the opportunity to refine his skill at combining music with motion pictures at a more relaxed pace than was typical in Hollywood. Tiomkin aficionados may be interested in comparing these documentary scores to the recent Tadlow Music (www.tadlowmusic.com) release of The Guns of Navarone to hear how music the composer created for 1940s combat footage affected and influenced his dramatic Guns score decades later. And Classical music fans may be curious to hear Tiomkin's adaptation of other Russian composer's music, particularly Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7 ("Leningrad"), then in its infancy.

As part of The Film Music Society's Restoration Series, this CD release helps to fund the nonprofit group's efforts toward preserving and restoring motion picture and television music manuscripts, audio recordings, and historical texts. The album's producer and art director Marilee Bradford is pleased that this Tiomkin CD has received wonderful accolades and great sales. "We're nearly sold out," says Bradford. "It's a sincere tribute to Tiomkin seeing three generations of film music lovers so enthusiastic about his documentary music. The Society is honored to release it." Other recent releases by the FMS include Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Book (score by Miklos Rozsa) and Music from CBS Westerns (compilation of scores by Moross, Herrmann, Goldsmith and Waxman). Future audio restoration projects will feature music by David Raksin, Herbert Stothart, Jerrold Immel, and other important film and TV composers whose works are not often available on CD. Executive producer Henry Adams adds, "It's a thrill, and certainly a rare opportunity, to hear Tiomkin's documentary film music as he wrote it some sixty years ago."

The disc contains 47 tracks and nearly 80 minutes of music, including some outtakes, with an accompanying 16-page booklet. An expanded version of the liner notes by Warren Sherk will be published as an article in The Cue Sheet, the Film Music Society journal available to Society members. To join go to www.filmmusicsociety.org. Michael Matessino provided the restoration and mastering from digital transfers made by Lance Bowling from material in the Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at the University of Southern California thanks to Olivia Tiomkin Douglas. Ned Comstock and Patrick Russ served as advisors on historical aspects of the project.

This limited edition of 1,000 copies won't last, so order yours today. For more information and sample tracks.