Skip to main content

Charade

Encouraged by how much I enjoyed his album The Big Band Sound Of Henry Mancini (aka Combo!), I bought a few more Mancini LPs, always very cheaply, finding some of them less to my liking, but others that I thought were delightful. My favourite among them must be this soundtrack to the 1963 movie Charade, which, as the cover states, starred Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

The opening 'Charade (Main Title)' begins with insistent woodblock, joined by other percussion until the memorable theme kicks in. The Parisian setting of the film is reflected by musical Gallicisms such as the third track 'Bateau Mouche'. The coolly jazzy 'Mégève' is a highlight. 'Bye Bye Charlie' is a mournful cue for string quartet, By sharp contrast, it's followed by the sound of a mechanical 'orchestrion' or something resembling one, in 'The Happy Carousel'.

The variety of sounds and styles is balanced by a judicious use of reprised timbres & musical motives, making for a satisfyingly coherent whole. Calliope-like tones crop up a few times. The main theme is re-stated in 'Charade (Vocal)' and again in the closing 'Charade (Carousel)'. All of the tracks are brief and to the point and the album breezes past in about half an hour. I was a little disappointed, when I belatedly saw the movie (somehow I'd avoided it until a few years ago) that the music wasn't a more prominent part of it.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...
Post a Comment
Read more