Music Album Review: 'Cinema Serenade'

-



On July 29, 1997, Sony Masterworks released Cinema Serenade, the first of two post Schindler's List movie themed albums featuring the collaborative team of violinist Itzhak Perlman and Oscar-winning composer John Williams. 

 Film scores have been a passion of mine since I first heard Williams' unforgettable score for Star Wars at the age of 14. Since then I have become acutely aware of movie themes and orchestral music's ability to affect one's perceptions and emotions. As a result, my musical collection includes many CDs of music by composers such as James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith and, of course, maestro Williams.

Cinema Serenade, featuring acclaimed violinist Itzhak Perlman, John Williams and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, is a beautiful 13-track collection of movie themes by various notable composers, including  Quincy Jones, Elmer Bernstein, Michel Legrand, John Barry, Ennio Morricone, Luis Bonfa, Andre Previn and, of course, Williams.


Because the featured solo instrument is a violin, producer John Frost, Williams and Perlman chose themes that, with the exception of the Carlos Gardel tango "Por Una Cabeza" (heard in Scent of a Woman) and Williams' Irish-styled "Theme from Far and Away," are sentimental, stately and even melancholic. Listen to the plaintive "Papa Can You Hear Me?" from Yentl or "Theme from Schindler's List" (both evocative of European Jewish music), or the haunting "I Will Wait For You" from Michel Legrand's score The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with closed eyes and an open heart...I don't think there is anything more moving than Perlman's performance of those beautiful themes.

Williams conducts the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra with his usual golden touch, and although some of the arrangements in this CD have been tweaked to highlight Perlman's violin, the effect is not at all detrimental. Indeed, this is one of the best albums of the genre. Along with Cinema Serenade II: The Golden Age, it is a must-have CD for both lovers of classic film scores and classical music.


Track List

1. The Color Purple: Main Title 4:29

2. Scent of A Woman: Tango (Por Una Cabeza) 3:51

3. Yentl: “Papa, Can you Hear Me?”  4:59

4. Il Postino: Theme  3:44

5. The Age of Innocence: Theme 4:10

6. Far and Away: Theme 5:34

7. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg: “I Will Wait for You” 3:43

8. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Theme  3:40

9. Sabrina: Theme  4:58

10. Out of Africa: Main Title  3:19

11. Black Orpheus: Manha de Carnaval  4:13

12.  Schindler's List: Theme  3:18

13.  Cinema Paradiso: Love Theme  3:18

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's 'It'?

-
Image
How many movies have been made based on Stephen King's It ? It  has been adapted twice for filmed audio-visual media. The first filmed version of  It was a TV limited series; the second was a duology of theatrically-released movies.  The first adaptation of Stephen King’s 1986 doorstop of a novel was a 1990 adaptation made as a two-part ABC miniseries for television. Among the cast members: Tim Reid, Harry Anderson, Annette O’Toole, John Ritter, and Richard Thomas. The miniseries also featured Tim Curry as the evil Pennywise the Clown. Adapted for television by director Tommy Lee Wallace and Lawrence D. Cohen (who also adapted King’s  Carrie  for director Brian De Palma in 1976),  It  was okay but a watered-down take on the scary novel about a group of friends who must face off against a monstrous entity known as “It” twice. Once as kids in 1960, then again as adults in 1990. (Like  11,22.63,  the TV version of It avoids the year ...
Read more

Talking About 'Band of Brothers' (HBO Miniseries): Why were there no black soldiers in the Band of Brothers TV miniseries?

-
Image
Band of Brothers,  sadly, reflects one of the sad realities of American society in the 1940s - racial segregation in the armed forces. Although there  were  a few all-Negro (as blacks were referred to in those days) units in the U.S. Army and the Army Air Forces that served with distinction in the European Theater of Operations, most black servicemen were assigned to non-combat units in Supply of Services and other support forces. Most of these soldiers were truck drivers, anti-aircraft gunners, barrage balloon handlers, engineers, stevedores, clerks, cooks, corpsmen, and so on. Only late in the war (fall of 1944 and winter/spring 1945) did large numbers of black infantrymen see combat against German forces, and even then they served in all-black units commanded by white officers. © 2001 Home Box Office, Dreamworks SKG, and Play-Tone Pictures The 101st Airborne Division was an all-American unit made up of individuals from many different groups - Easy Company’...
Read more

'The Boy in Striped Pajamas' movie review

-
Image
(C) 2008 Miramax, Heyday Films, BBC Films Writer-director Mark Herman’s 2008 film “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” is a faithful but (necessarily) condensed adaptation of John Boyne’s 2007 novel about a German boy, Bruno (Asa Butterfield), who befriends Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), an eight-year-old inmate in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.  Like Boyne’s novel, the film is not a definitive history of the Holocaust. It’s not as graphic or historically accurate as Steven Spielberg’s 1993 classic “Schindler’s List,” nor was it intended to be. (Indeed, Herman says in the behind-the-scenes featurette “Friendship Beyond the Fence” that he doesn’t consider “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas” to be a “Holocaust film.”) Set in the early 1940s at the height of Nazi Germany’s power, the film follows Bruno on a journey that takes him and his family from Berlin to German-occupied Poland. His father Ralf (David Thewlis) is a newly-promoted SS officer with a new posting: commandant...
Read more