hollywood adaptations of classical compositions

The program’s earliest piece, Harry Warren’s “We’re in the Money,” sung by the Maida Vale Singers, brought us back to the pre–Hays Code exuberance (and near nudity) of Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933. Wilson’s program offered an eclectic sampling otherwise, one that nevertheless captured the evolution of film music over the decades that defined classic Hollywood. Steiner’s suite for John Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre, a 1948 neo-western laid over with a classic film-noir double cross that only Humphrey Bogart could pull off, also resonated with enthralling verve.

Under Wilson’s baton, the film’s themes moved from nervy to triumphant, following the story in all its delicious detail. This Pygmalion story, starring Bette Davis, chronicles a neurotic Bostonian teenager’s metamorphosis into a self-confident woman capable of handling the complexities of an affair with a married man played by the dashing Paul Henried ( Casablanca’s idealistic anti-Nazi resistance leader). Wilson performed a suite of Steiner’s music for Curtiz’s iconic Casablanca in an earlier Proms program, but he more than made up for its absence in this concert by featuring his own favorite Steiner score-in a suite of his own arrangement-of the nearly contemporaneous Now, Voyager (1942). His genius lay in his assignment of Wagnerian leitmotifs to characters and situations, often insinuating them ironically amid lush orchestral depictions of dynamic action when things go awry. Steiner proved the more prolific of the two, churning out some three hundred film scores, twenty-four of which were nominated for Academy Awards, with three taking the Oscar. Never quite forgetting his training in the classical tradition, he limited himself to sixteen film scores, but infused them with the narrative excitement that his colleague Max Steiner, a fellow prodigy of Jewish heritage who completed the four-year program at Vienna’s Imperial Academy of Music in just one year, had already introduced to Hollywood. Korngold, a musical prodigy steeped in the late–German Romantic tradition and praised by Richard Strauss on his way to becoming a serious composer at the age of twenty, landed in Hollywood as a Jewish refugee. The rewards on this particular night were immense and amply proved the contemporary film composer John Williams’s point that “if it weren’t for the movies, no one would be able to write this kind of music anymore.”Īccordingly, the concert began with Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s spirited overture to The Sea Hawk, Michael Curtiz’s 1940 swashbuckler featuring Errol Flynn.

Since then, it has tendered toward semi-staged classic musicals, with the occasional diversion into concerts of set numbers. Wilson’s orchestra has a decade-long association with the Proms, going back to a 2009 concert featuring selections from musicals produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The Royal Albert Hall’s standing-room-only stalls section smilingly swayed to the jazzy melodies in a manner of concert attendance rarely observed in England but vividly reminiscent of an era when behemoth movie studios employed vast music departments and full orchestras staffed by an immense pool of talent that had fled war-torn Europe for California’s milder climate and gentler politics. A millennial might look up from his avocado toast to ask who remembers such antiquities, but this concert was nearly sold out. The superb John Wilson Orchestra, specializing in classic Hollywood and Broadway tunes, returned the “Golden Age” of yesteryear to the BBC Proms with a cavalcade of delightfully memorable music featured in Warner Brothers films from the early 1930s to the late ’60s.

Hollywood adaptations of classical compositions