[This month begins the count-down to Classicstoday.com’s 25th year since our launch in 1999. In celebration, today we are revisiting three reviews from our first week of publication. All of these recordings are still available.]
To anyone unfamiliar with the origin of the music on this disc, the cover’s bold pronouncement, “The Original Score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold”, will lead you to believe that this Midsummer Night’s Dream music is an original Korngold composition. The recording’s opening seconds tell you that this music is from Mendelssohn’s familiar score. What gives? It turns out that Korngold was commissioned to compile and adapt Mendelssohn’s music to Max Reinhardt’s “only completed sound film” and this hour-long recording contains a suite prepared from the original 116-minute film score.
Film music buffs should know that several of Korngold’s sequences that were cut from the film are recorded here for the first time. Mendelssohn fans should know that Korngold borrowed not only from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also used “themes and excerpts” from symphonies, chamber works, lieder, and solo piano works. From the listener’s standpoint, the performances by orchestra, choirs, and soloists (including some spoken dialogue) are competent and sonically satisfying, and the accompanying listener’s guide helps explain the sequence of what could be a puzzling mix of Mendelssohn excerpts and adaptations. Ultimately, however, this truncated presentation of Korngold’s original score will leave historians and film score completists wanting; for Korngold fans, it’s an interesting document, a curious novelty. [9/24/1999]
