Gregory Hamilton The Hollywood Cello

One day, as we were searching for duos to play together, my wife and I discovered a sonata for viola and cello by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. It had been published almost 50 years ago and there were only a few copies to be found in libraries around the world. Reading through the piece, we realized it's significance and wanted to give it the attention it deserved. At about the same time, I was planning my first commercial recording and decided to include a movement from this piece. Little did I know that when Tedesco wrote the viola and cello duo he was living in California in the midst of a successful career composing music for over 200 films! In my research of Tedesco and his fellow Hollywood film composers of that era (the 1940s and 1950s), I discovered that the majority were European, not American, and that many had built successful careers as composers of 'serious' classical music before coming to the United States to write music for movies. Offering concert works by film composers of the Golden Era, I thought, would make an interesting collection for a CD. The Golden Era of American cinema - the end of silent filmmaking to the early 1960s - took place during a time when European and American history converged, especially in the arts. These Europeans were primarily refugees from the years leading up to and during World War II, many of them German and Austrian Jews. In the film industry, screen stars Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamar, and Paul Henreid, writer Billy Wilder, and the directors Fritz Lang and Erich Pommer are just some of the famous names that worked together in the German cinema, only to leave their homeland when their work was censored and it became unsafe for them to stay. The same circumstances existed for composers. Some found a new and unexpected career in Hollywood, which meant sacrificing some of their accustomed autonomy in order to work within the more controlled environment of Hollywood film. Two Child Prodigies: The life and career of Erich Wolfgang Korngold is well documented in numerous biographies. A child prodigy and a brilliant composer, he left a life of fame in Vienna just before Hitler occupied Austria. Korngold made a lasting mark on film music with his characteristically lush and grand orchestrations in a late-Romantic style. Kathrin Korngold Hubbard comments on the difficulties her grandfather faced once in California: 'Fifty years ago, Erich Wolfgang Korngold died in Hollywood, brokenhearted - believing himself a forgotten man. Happily, in the last decade, his music appears to be undergoing a true renaissance.' The unpublished Romance Impromptu was conceived for a scene in the film-noir melodrama Deception (1946) starring Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains. It was a natural choice, as the film's plot is centered upon a concert cellist. The scene was eventually cut, though, and this music was never heard, apparently because they couldn't achieve the proper camera angles to make Henreid look like a believable cellist in the close shots. Thankfully, a cello concerto written by Korngold did make the cut and is in fact heard throughout much of the movie. Tanzlied des Pierrot is a transcription of an aria from Korngold's opera Die tote Stadt, completed when he was 23 years old. Holland native Richard Hageman is known for his work as an actor, pianist, and conductor as well as for his film scores. Most of the music in the John Ford films in the 1930s and 40s were composed by Hageman, earning him an Oscar for Stagecoach in 1939. Hageman conducted at the Metropolitan Opera for many years and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra summer season for six years. This forgotten Recitative and Romance was published in 1961 by G. Schirmer. The Russian Nationalists: Lazare Saminsky was a conservative Jew, defending the importance of old synagogue music in his adopted (and more progressive) home, the United States. This Meditation is in the style of a cantillation, reminiscent of the nigun, an improvisatory tune, often wordless, sung as a prayer or lament. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, Saminsky immigrated