Frankel's film music often sounds more like modern concert music than film music and even Curse of the Werewolf is no exception, especially the way this re-recording of it was engineered/recorded.

The score in the film is up front and center and it's stark too. It comes closer to Don Banks and his note-spinning than James Bernard and his simple motifs and chords. In the film it hits most of its marks but still always feels a little out of place because it doesn't sound conventional enough. You're watching scenes and this odd music comes in and demands you pay it attention.

The album claims the entire score is there but the film had some banquet dances as source. I don't know if these were by Frankel or not but they aren't included on the disc only the dramatic cues are. The score doesn't really cut loose until the final moments which are heavy on the drums. The end title looks forward to the Frankel of Battle of the Bulge.

The Net and So Long at The Fair were ok. Nice to have something more than the standard Carriage and Pair cue. After Curse of the Werewolf it was hard to imagine they were by the same composer.

It's been years since I've seen The Prisoner (this being an Alec Guinness film not the Patrick McGoohan series) though it is available on DVD. Not as modern or filled with thunder as Werewolf, even this is still more concert hall than movie theater.

I have this, the Japanese Bulge, the Bulge re-record, the Importance of Being Earnest compilation, the British version of Night and the City, and some other odds & ends. Bulge is a great score as is The Man in the White Suit but beyond that I find Frankel's sound wrong for movies (or maybe he just suffers when heard in re-records), a bit too modern to be accessible and service the films. I hate to be so unfair but I just don't get into the guy as much. Werewolf is loud and noisy for sure but that alone can't make it a great horror score.

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On a lighter note, I ran into a few neat finds. I saw a documentary from 1959, Masters of the Congo Jungle, with a solid score by Richard Cornu who I'd never heard of before.

I picked up a CD compilation of 2 Les Baxter theme albums, The Sacred Idol and Ports of Pleasure. The Sacred Idol, if I recall correctly, may have been based on a film score. In any case, it was lush romantic exotica at its best.

However....a second playing helped me to appreciate the recording and the music as music a little better. Curse of the Werewolf still doesn't quite work as film music but it's interesting enough, despite all its sturm & drang, to listen to on its own. Dictated by scenes, Frankel has a neat way of creating a mood (sometimes using bells or solo instruments) and having that build into thunder climaxes. But that's about as positive as I can get on it. I'm sure his scores sound closer to his symphonies than they do to any other kind of film music. Is this so bad? No, in theory, but I like film music in part for its conventions, its bold themes, etc. a good deal of which Frankel avoids or pays lip service to.

It's nice as I said above to have a kind of "extended" Carriage and Pair cue, a slightly different version of the piece than the concert version. Maybe the piece sounds pop-ish even in its original orchestration but seemed to be played as pop even here. That wouldn't be so bad if the mics had been closer. It still sounds like pop concert music in this presentation. I suspect Curse of the Werewolf would have sounded more like this too only the score is loud enough that it got to the distanced mics & avoided the problem. Maybe that's unfair. The piano-based Net theme was soft and still audible. The somewhat less sturm & drang Prisoner sounded closely-mic-ed enough in its quieter passages as well. The Prisoner too is more conventional dramatic scoring and decent enough music even if it has a sting or crescendo too many. But you wouldn't call it typical film music either.

What I find interesting about Frankel's sound is that it really sounds like modern concert music with occassional nods to film music convention. I'm surprised he had a film music career or even wanted one. I don't quite understand how Frankel could get hired to do movies his sound is as different from Walton & Arnold and what stands as typical British film music as Morricone's is from Rota & Cicognini.

But looking at the British model where classical composers like Bliss, Walton, Arnold, Vaughan-Williams & even Holst set the stage of what the British film was going to sound like, it only follows suit that concert composers like Frankel, Auric, Easdale, Farnon, and their ilk would dominate until Addison & Barry come on the scene. British film music has a concert hall quality to it to begin with that is at odds with the Hollywood conventions of what film music is "supposed" to sound like. Even here, my guess is that only a very few British composers for film or TV are exclusively media composers who don't have any concert works to their credit.

In any case, maybe I'm having a barrier problem and it's not so much the recording which seems spot on in many ways or the music's quality but simply my own coming to terms with Frankel's actual sound.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
it's interesting enough, despite all its sturm & drang, to listen to on its own.

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That's what a soundtrack CD is for, and why they should be evaluated as a CD and not how they worked in/attached to the film.

Ryan

That finale from "Curse of the Werewolf" is an interesting piece of music as well. The whole score fits perfectly with the Hammer sound that was being developed for their films. It's like that 2-disc FSM release of Fried's scores for the Dracula films. I would not kick back and listen to it as music, but it still does not diminish his attempt.

"Night of the Iguane" and "Battle of the Bulge" are places to start to hear Frankel. This is a little further out on the periphery but still interesting.

As a side note, I've been reading through a copy of Ian Johnson's book on Alwyn's film music and there is an approach to writing for film that seems to emphasize that the music cannot, and should not, make sense apart from the film itself. One gets the sense that composers such as Alwyn would be confused about why anyone would just want to hear the score without the images.

I'm not sure that Werewolf fits in that closely with the other Hammer scores being done around the same time. Yes, It's closer to them than to more conventional film music. However, it's the James Bernard scores that strike me as neat music to listen to both in and away from the films. This Frankel score isn't as accessible. And it felt out of place in the movie. Interesting music yes, but listenable & enjoyable is another thing. But as you say, referring to Gerald Fried, it wasn't meant to be kick back & relax music. However, none of Frankel's music concert or film seems to fit into the kick back & relax music mode anyway.

I like Night of Iguana, but the LP only gives us a few guitar cues. Bulge is the real masterpiece though the re-record was just lousy.

It kind of boggled my mind to read that of Alwyn because I think, as a person who composes music too, that these guys were kidding themselves if they thought people were not listening to their contribution. I have not heard much of Frankel's concert work...maybe that's on Naxos' horizon.

And because I care about others, I fight against lousy re-records that would poison their souls when the same companies could pony up a little more cash and get the original tracks to release instead. I'm not sure if the OST is a re-record or original tracks but either way it's Frankel conducting and doing a great job of it. If you want to hear the Bulge accept NO substitutes. No matter who is at the baton of some modern re-record, I doubt Stromberg or Kunzel or Gamba could top the 60s tracks and that's that.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
Believe it or not I do care about others (as long as I don't have to sacrifice anything myself of course).

And because I care about others, I fight against lousy re-records that would poison their souls when the same companies could pony up a little more cash and get the original tracks to release instead. I'm not sure if the OST is a re-record or original tracks but either way it's Frankel conducting and doing a great job of it. If you want to hear the Bulge accept NO substitutes. No matter who is at the baton of some modern re-record, I doubt Stromberg or Kunzel or Gamba could top the 60s tracks and that's that.

Well you didn't expect me to say anything different did you?

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I'm not sure if it's appropriate for me to wade in here, as the composer's stepson and one who has had much to do with the re-recordings! However, I confess to being puzzled by some of Lou Goldberg's comments. Of course, I'm delighted by the reverence in which he holds the OST with Frankel conducting the Philharmonia, and who am I to argue with that. Still, the new CD of Bulge offers twice as much music as fitted on the old LP and, as I was delighted to discover for myself, the additional tracks contain some wonderful stuff, no less impressive than the OST's tracks. I should also say that there was some dodgy intonation and a few clangers on the OST (mainly in the brass)which, happily, is not so with the new version. More generally, while I agree it's a great thing to have the composer conducting his own score, I think Albert did a fine job with the re-recording. Granted, things could always be better in places. I'd better just say that I would be thrilled if someone reissued the OST and at an affordable price (the Japanese releases, both on LP and CD, were prohibitive). Not much hope of this, so far as I can tell.

As to the new Curse of the Werewolf CD, most of the feedback has been positive and it seems to be selling rather well too. Carl Davis has said he would love to do a second album, so I assume Naxos will be keeping an eye on the sales figures.............

Cheers,
Dimitri

Before I go on, I want to say that in general I'm fond of Frankel's film music and concert works. I could point to a number of films where Frankel's scores really aid the film and make great listening besides. I think both The Man in the White Suit and Battle of the Bulge are amazing. I recently picked up the Night and the City album and was impressed with Frankel's version of the score.

However, I still have to stand by the things I said earlier. For every Frankel film score that is spot on, I can find ones that just seem too modern or somehow a bit wrong for the films they accompany. I think Curse of the Werewolf is one of those. Of course, he did a large number of film scores and he wouldn't have been hired if people didn't think he was an asset to their films. So my statement is merely my own one opinion from the crowd.

Still it is a shame that the releases of Frankel's film music have been rather scant over the years and even hearing things like the symphonies was difficult up until recently. You can't say anything pro or con one way or the other about what you can't even get the chance to hear.

There are a few things you need to know about me in regards to this topic as well. You've come in on a vocal & long-standing displeasure I've had with most re-recorded film music. And my dislike for re-recordings is not always shared by other people who listen to them.

To be as brief as possible, here is some of my rationale.

Film studios have had different budgets for the music they put in films, but in general, they could afford to keep the best symphony players (who did a lot of such work & became familiar with the ins & outs of it) and could afford to keep everyone working on the scoring stage through repeated takes until things could be perfected. In brief, they had great players and time to get things right. A combination that produced hard to top results.

Because the music for films was to be mixed onto a film's soundtrack, in most cases, it was recorded with the microphones close to the players which gives the music a more dynamic sound than what you would hear if you were listening to it in say Albert Hall. And if you've listened to a lot of film music, you like to hear it in this dynamic, close-mic fashion, or at least I do.

In contrast, a lot of film music that is re-recorded today suffers from the following faults:

1) Poorer players in some cases unfamiliar with film music and how best to perform it are hired to play on rushed recordings because the recording company doesn't have the funds to stay on the recording stage long enough to get things perfected the way a film studio could.

2) When the original recording for the film was made, syncronization was a key factor. So the conductor would play to a film clip getting the timings & emphasis correct. Re-records don't have to be so slavish, but by not listening to the earlier studio recording and not conducting to film clips, the re-record can really deviate in time and energy in ways which don't do the music justice.

3) Also, you'll find recording engineers who find it easier to record film music as they do all concert music recordings, with one or two mics set away from the players, which makes it all sound uniform & lackluster.

4) Add to this that conductors wish to interpret the music for themselves and often work from reconstructed sketches or arrangements that don't closely match the version that appears in the film and the end result is often "lesser" (atleast to me) than just merely a different version or interpretation.

Also, to understand this last point better, you have to follow that I see film music as a different sort of animal than concert music. To an orchestra & conductor they might think there isn't much difference between a Frankel symphony and a Frankel film score and treat them both the same. I would say that there is a difference in how they should be performed and treated and that instead of finding new interpretations film music comes out better when you try to approximate the spirit of the original version done for the film. Musicians as a rule hate to copy some previous performance but I'd rather make them unhappy doing it than give them free reign to go far afield and produce something weak. As a film music fan, I don't just want things performed well, I like them to resemble the music as I know it from the film as much as possible. This may have something to do with nostalgia and memory for pleasures of the past as much as it does a love for music but it is an extra factor that comes into play when recording older film music for the public, their original associations with the film and the music as presented there.

Look at it another way. I see Battle of the Bulge and I hear the score as it is in the film and like it. I watch the film a number of times and that is the music & performance I become most wedded to. Then I pick up the album and play that version for many years. Then lastly, I acquire a copy of the re-recording and the differences and distance between it and what I've become so familiar with and grown to love over time are simply too glaring for me to accept well, especially if they strike me as weaker and not just different. I can appreciate different versons of the same work but not if one version is so glaringly poorer than another. So I criticize the re-record negatively.

I was recently playing a John Barry score from the 60s and I caught bad playing on a couple of the tracks that nonetheless got by into the final music as used. This does indeed happen. There's no saying that the original performance of the music for the film will always be the best performance of the music. So right there there is some rationale for re-recording film music. And it is amazing to hear a re-record done well that actually compares well with or even improves on the original studio recording. It just seems that in general the studio performances are in 9 out of 10 cases usually better.

Now it is a great thing to have more music on a re-recording than is available on the OST. A lot of people like re-recordings because they often give you more music than you could have previously. I know from watching the film of Bulge that there was a lot more great music in it than is on the OST album.

However, even if a re-record gives you the great opportunity to hear this extra music or to hear a score that there was no previous version of to hear at all (as in the Davis and Albert's Earnest albums), that plus can be countered by all the flaws in performance & recording I just talked about. What good is having the extra music if it is played & sounds poorly? It's just more of a bad thing.

This said, I think Davis did a better job conducting Frankel than Albert did (I thought Albert's Earnest album was better in both performance and engineering than the Bulge one) and that Naxos did a better job of engineering the music than on the Albert disc, but even here the engineering wasn't as up front as I prefer. And because of that I even have to suspect that Albert's recordings of Frankel concert works might not be the best we could have of them. Albert may love Frankel (and he seems like a friendly cheerful guy from his photo) and he may wish to record Frankel but I wish he was a bit better at it or that someone else with the same love of Frankel had done the recordings. But as you say, you had a hand in the recordings yourself and feel satisfied with them.

As you yourself say "things could always be better in places" however even if we can't always get perfection there are greater & lesser versions of what we can get. And, as a rule, I don't like to settle for & praise what could have been better.

That said, I'm certainly up for Davis trying another Frankel recording especially if he records scores I like more than COTW. If he does Battle of the Bulge cues you might compare them with the Albert version to see which you prefer.

So, as Frankel's stepson, are you the estate? A great deal of British film music in general has been lost as most of the British producers jettisoned the recordings and sheet music. Just what Frankel film scores exist in part or in whole? Do you have any recordings that you might be able to get some record company to consider issuing? Did Frankel keep his scores, sketches, etc. or not? Where did the COTW and The Prisoner scores come from? Are they all in a University library or the BFI or do you have them all out in the garage?!

Even if I'm not always fond of re-records, you can't even have them without the materials to work from first. And it would be a shocking loss to find most of the Frankel scores have disappeared along with the rest of British film music. Also, one can be optimistic and hope that some day a conductor, an orchestra, and a recording company will come along to re-record film music at the highest possible level and if that day comes you'll want the materials around to give them.

Thanks for visiting the site & writing us. And Cheers back.

NP: "Could You Be Loved" (Bob Marley)

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
It is absolutely appropriate that you wade in here & I'm glad that you found us.

SNIP

So, as Frankel's stepson, are you the estate? A great deal of British film music in general has been lost as most of the British producers jettisoned the recordings and sheet music. Just what Frankel film scores exist in part or in whole? Do you have any recordings that you might be able to get some record company to consider issuing? Did Frankel keep his scores, sketches, etc. or not? Where did the COTW and The Prisoner scores come from? Are they all in a University library or the BFI or do you have them all out in the garage?!

Even if I'm not always fond of re-records, you can't even have them without the materials to work from first. And it would be a shocking loss to find most of the Frankel scores have disappeared along with the rest of British film music. Also, one can be optimistic and hope that some day a conductor, an orchestra, and a recording company will come along to re-record film music at the highest possible level and if that day comes you'll want the materials around to give them.

Thanks for visiting the site & writing us. And Cheers back.

[Message edited by Lou Goldberg on 07-24-2006]

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Many thanks for the welcoming message and extensive follow-up. To answer your questions first, I am certainly a part of the Estate: technically, it's my mother but I handle most of the musical and business side of things for her.

As to original material, the answer is, sadly, as your posting implies: most of the Frankel scores disappeared along with all those other lost gems. The re-recordings have taken advantage of most that survived, i.e. Battle of the Bulge, Night of the Iguana, Curse of the Werewolf, The prisoner,
some cues from Trottie True and a collated version of The Importance of Being Earnest (the latter having turned up in the BBC Music Library). Footsteps in the Fog, The Net, The Years Between and the additional segments from So Long at the Fair were my own reconstructions. At this point, the only extant material not yet recorded is the score for Guns of Darkness and that from Orders to Kill (plus a few cues from Brothers-in-Law). Increasingly, further Frankel film music CDs will depend on reconstruction efforts by me/whoever. It is very frustrating that so many wonderful scores are lost but at least BF did save those few scores which are, arguably, his most important for film. As a matter of record, those surviving scores are lodged with the British Library as part of their Frankel collection. Of course, we kept copies of all the material.

Regarding your general comments about re-recordings, I feel somewhat equivocal. I understand your point of view about the ambience of the original recordings, the quality of the session players and so forth. It's true that most re-recordings employ a concert-hall type of ambience which is quite unlike the originals but I think this can work well if a particular score has a symphonic character (like Bulge, say). Night of the Iguana, with its more intimate, ensemble character, is probably better served by a close-miked approach. However, in this case, the OST was very badly balanced and mixed, added to which only a handful of the tracks made it to LP (along with those, IMO, most unwelcome Mexican-flavoured tracks which sound like musical non-sequiters!). To this, I can add an interesting fact: BF was sometimes mortified by the way in which his scores were butchered by the sound editors, etc! So, from that standpoint, the original soundtracks may not represent the composer's own intentions all that closely. Bulge was a good example: the original idea was that the music would be in prominence, leaving all the gunfire and explosions in the background. In the event, it was the other way around. Of course, this has no bearing on the OST album itself, where the music could be heard as was intended but the film itself gives only fleeting hints of the score's stature.

I'd probably agree that the ambience of the OST as preferable to that on the re-recording, though, as I said earlier, the additional material is such a bonus that I have little to complain about. Btw, I doubt that Naxos - or any other label - would consider doing yet another re-recording: mainly, they all want to be "first" with something and certainly don't want to compete with eachother in the same scores. I suppose that selected suites from Bulge, Iguana and Werewolf might be an option sometime but who knows? So far as the OST of Bulge is concerned, I do wonder if the music tracks of all those additional cues are stored somewhere, or if it is just a matter of the nine tracks originally issued.

All things considered, I'm happy to enjoy a mixture of OSTs and re-recordings (since a choice is not really necessary) and take what both have to offer. Of course, there is another factor to be considered - not all OSTs make for satisfactory listening "as written": Bulge, Iguana & Werewolf all seem to work very well as they are but there are many other scores I'd like to see recorded which should ideally be arranged to form coherent, more extended sequences.

Thank you for considering my viewpoint on re-recordings. You seem to have noticed a few of the inherent problems yourself. The question is how best to get around them so we can get the best re-recordings possible.

As a result of this discussion, I went back to play the Albert/Earnest album again. It's my own taste or prejudice but I seem to prefer Frankel when he is being tonal to his being modern. He creates more interesting musical effects in his atonal work but the tonal material seems better suited IMO for films.

You brought up a word that I've never thought of using in this context, ambience. I often talk about "the sound" of older recordings being preferable to newer ones and one of the elements I'm referring to is ambience, analog over digital, for example. Because even when we do get a solid performance of film music today, it's very often defeated by the "thinness" or "space" surrounding the music. In some recordings there is a kind of "recorded in a tomb" quality, a "deadness" that I can't really articulate in scientific terms too well.

The laserdisc of Bulge included music for an overture, entr'acte, and exit music. Warner records has issued cues from the Bulge OST on other LP albums other than the OST. So, I would have to presume that either Warners or the producer/production company for Bulge would have the original tapes of the OST and the entire score as well. However, the complete score could also be lost or damaged at this point. If the entire score was recorded in England, it's possible you might be able to issue this without paying huge re-use fees to American musicians unions. In any case, as the estate, you would be the one to best make these inquiries.

Thor--So you vastly like re-records over originals, huh? Ugh. First Zimmer & now this? I shake my head. I totally & completely give up on you. You are a lost cause.

I think the FSM thread brings up all the various views people feel about re-recordings.

Dimitri reminds us that Frankel wasn't always pleased with how his scores were edited into the film and a re-recording can follow the composer's intentions rather than the version the film contains. Stromberg/Morgan use this approach in their re-recordings, they side with the composer's sketch over the film version. Then there is the debate over whether re-recordings should try to copy the version in the film or be played as any other new performance of music. These points of contention and others were all brought up in the FSM thread where I found a number of people writing who write even longer posts than I do (!) and think and argue these points along the same lines as I do as well (interesting).

It's a very important thread to look at. But people here already know what my preferences are on this issue.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
Thor--So you vastly like re-records over originals, huh? Ugh. First Zimmer & now this? I shake my head. I totally & completely give up on you. You are a lost cause.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
Dimitri--Thank you very much for writing back. So there are only 2 scores and part of a third left and that's that. A real shame.

It really is, especially considering how many he composed!

SNIP

As a result of this discussion, I went back to play the Albert/Earnest album again. It's my own taste or prejudice but I seem to prefer Frankel when he is being tonal to his being modern. He creates more interesting musical effects in his atonal work but the tonal material seems better suited IMO for films.

Well, as it happens (which you have probably noted), most of his film music falls into the latter category

SNIP

The laserdisc of Bulge included music for an overture, entr'acte, and exit music. Warner records has issued cues from the Bulge OST on other LP albums other than the OST. So, I would have to presume that either Warners or the producer/production company for Bulge would have the original tapes of the OST and the entire score as well. However, the complete score could also be lost or damaged at this point. If the entire score was recorded in England, it's possible you might be able to issue this without paying huge re-use fees to American musicians unions. In any case, as the estate, you would be the one to best make these inquiries.

The laserdisc evidently has the extras that appear on the wide-screen video release. The "Overture" (originally scored for the "Armaments Train" sequence) is the only real musical extra, since the exit music reprises the Prelude and the entr'acte music reprises music from "The tanks emerge and break through". The score was dubbed here (at Pinewood Studios), though I suspect the master tapes were shipped back to Warner Bros, USA. The re-use fee problem kicked in in the UK at about the time Bulge was released and costs can be prohibitive. However, where a soundtrack album is included in the original deal, I don't think there are further re-use fees payable, since these are deemed to have been included in the original orchestral fees. At the same time, I do know - and this is just as bad - that licensing the tracks from Warner Bros would be hugely expensive too! If only Warner would reissue the OST themselves, along with any extra tracks that might survive.

SNIP

Dimitri reminds us that Frankel wasn't always pleased with how his scores were edited into the film and a re-recording can follow the composer's intentions rather than the version the film contains.

The story goes that he once came out of a preview and was physically sick over the way his score had been mutilated! I believe it might have been the film "Appointment With Venus" (aka "Island Rescue"), though I'm not certain.

Cheers,
Dimitri

P.S. Why am I a "non-standard userer"?! What's the difference between that and a standard one......and isn't a userer something different from a user?

[Message edited by Lou Goldberg on 07-24-2006]

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