Naxos is one of the heavy lifters when it comes to film-score CDs. This hybrid-SACD of Max Steiner’s music for The Adventures of Mark Twain is an important release of some very imaginative, well conceived music. John Morgan edited the 100-minute-plus original score to 71 minutes, dropping what he says is mainly repetitive material. Long as it is, the CD’s music is tightly organized from a few unifying motives, carrying the listener from one charming episode to the next.
The Moscow Symphony Orchestra and conductor William Stromberg, veterans of numerous Naxos/Marco Polo cinema score projects, show themselves masters of American movie music idioms. Much praise goes to the prominently featured contrabassoons, bassoons, and bass clarinet–and not just for their parodic contributions to the “Celebrated Jumping Frog” sequence.
What keeps this from being a 10/10 is the score’s lack of emotional scope. Although by the time of the film’s 1944 release, Twain scholars had come to recognize the author’s depth and more seriously explored his long-suppressed works of bitter satire, irreligious feeling, and disgust with humanity, these elements are by all accounts missing from the film and certainly are nowhere reflected in the music. This is music for a Sam Clemens depicted as folksy humorist, a kind of crotchety but lovable grandpa who had an interesting life and sure could spin a yarn. The Twain of Hadleyville is missing in action in a film intended to glorify a great American in the context of wartime morale-boosting.
So on this disc we have a symphonic piece equal in length to most Mahler symphonies, but without bitterness, struggle, or real tragedy; its mood never strays far from being gently joyful. But there are times when you just want music that’s uncomplicated, happy, and easily listenable, and in that respect I can give this a solid recommendation. The playing is excellent, and the 5-channel surround-sound engineering achieves a well defined, natural sound in a realistic acoustic space.
