Malcolm Arnold's Trapeze Score, Plus Reups

It was just about, oh, five years ago that I posted the soundtrack to The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, and promised to follow up with more works from the talented English composer Malcolm Arnold.

Here to make belated good on that promise is Arnold's 1956 score to the Burt Lancaster - Gina Lollobrigida - Tony Curtis circus epic Trapeze.

Malcolm Arnold

Well, half a score anyway. A good part of the listening experience is occupied by "The Entry of the Gladiators," two Sousa marches, and the Blue Danube waltz. This would be well and good except conductor Muir Mathieson apparently wanted his orchestra to sound like a circus band, with raucous results.

To me, bad music is only one of the many reasons not to go to the circus - or to watch circus movies. So I have not seen Trapeze, but I can tell you that it revolves around a love triangle (if such a thing is geometrically possible). As you might guess from the wonderfully vivid cover, the participants are Lancaster, Lollobrigida and Curtis. At least I assume that is Curtis on the endless rope ladder - he looks as much like William Shatner there.

Poor Tony has to watch as Burt and Gina do their mid-air smooching routine. Meanwhile a circus tableau seemingly as imagined by Hieronymous Bosch unfolds far below, with what looks like a Parisian gang fight in the corner.

They don't make record covers like this anymore, nor scores, for that matter, although honestly, this is not one of Arnold's best efforts. His cues are effective enough, but there aren't many of them, and the effect is not as impressive as some of Arnold's other works.

Columbia did not give its best efforts to the sound, either, although I have done my darndest to give the thin sonics some life and heft.

Now on to the reups, leading off with Arnold's Inn of the Sixth Happiness score.

Malcolm Arnold - Inn of the Sixth Happiness. A wonderful early stereo score with Arnold at the height of his powers. Remastered.

Jean Francaix - Concertino, Serenade. The composer is soloist in his delightful Concertino, and Eugen Jochum leads the ensemble in the equally delightful Serenade, in these Telefunken recordings from the 1930s. Remastered.

Eartha Kitt - RCA Victor Presents. The first LP by the vocalist-tigress, with many of her most famous numbers, including "C'est Si Bon." Also the Stan Freberg send up of the latter tune. Remastered.

George Byron - Sings Jerome Kern. Byron was a cabaret singer who happened to be married to Kern's widow. His performances are scrupulous and convincing.

Joe Venuti and Bobby Maxwell. Jazz violin and jazz harp, separately and together in this compilation from mid-century. Remastered.

As usual, the links above go to the original posts, New download links are in the comments, both there and here.

Louis Lane Conducts American Composers, Plus a Bonus

To mark the death of conductor Louis Lane, I recently shared on another site my transfer of Lane's 1961 Epic LP, "Music for Young America," made with the Cleveland Pops Orchestra, at that time the summer incarnation of the Cleveland Orchestra. Lane was the longtime assistant, associate and resident conductor of the Cleveland ensemble, during the Szell years.

I thought I might also make it available here, together with a substantial bonus of more music by Cleveland-related composers (see below).

Louis Lane

The performances in Lane's program of music by conservative American composers are finely judged and clean cut, a fitting tribute to an excellent musician and the superb Cleveland ensemble.

It may be a little ironic that the chosen “Music for Young America” was composed by five older composers, two of whom had already passed away at the time of the recording. But that doesn’t take away from the quality of the works themselves. The most familiar is Aaron Copland’s “An Outdoor Overture,” followed by the suite from Gian Carlo Menotti’s "Amahl and the Night Visitors." Wallingford Riegger’s “Dance Rhythms,” unlike many of his other works, is tonal.

The second side is devoted to two Cleveland composers. Herbert Elwell, longtime critic of The Plain Dealer, is represented by his most frequently performed work, the ballet suite from "The Happy Hypocrite." Finally, there is “The Old Chisholm Trail” from Arthur Shepherd’s suite “Horizons” (I believe Shepherd designated it as his Symphony No. 1), a relatively early example of Americana, dating from 1926.

To make the Cleveland connection complete, the informative liner notes are by Klaus Roy, longtime program annotator for the Cleveland Orchestra and himself a notable composer.

LINK to Music for Young America (April 2025 remastering)

Music by Herbert Elwell and Ernest Bloch

Now to the bonus disc - a private recording of Elwell's "Blue Symphony," a setting of John Gould Fletcher's poem "The Blue Symphony" from the 1940s, together with Ernest Bloch's Piano Quintet, written in 1923, when the composer was head of the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Herbert Elwell

The worthy performances are by the Feldman String Quartet, with soprano Elizabeth V. Forman and pianist Gloria Whitehurst Phillips. The recording was made for the Roanoke Fine Arts Center in 1962.

LINK to music by Elwell and Bloch (April 2025 remastering)

Ives and Sessions with Patricia Travers

When Patricia Travers died several years ago, her obituary in the New York Times melodramatically termed her the "violinist who vanished."

But Travers herself did not disappear, rather she abandoned a career that had recently transitioned from child prodigy to an uncertain future as an adult soloist.

As the Times relates, "In her early 20s, for the Columbia label, she made the first complete recording of Charles Ives’s Sonata No.2 for Violin and Piano, a modern American work requiring a mature musical intelligence. Not long afterward, she disappeared."

Patricia Travers

This is the recording that the newspaper mentions. It and the Sessions Duo for Violin and Piano were taped in April 1950, but she was in fact active for at least a few years thereafter. In June 1952 Columbia had her record another modern American work, Norman Dello Joio's Variations and Capriccio, with the composer at the piano.

On the evidence of this LP, Travers was certainly up to the task of rendering the first recorded performance of Ives's characteristic sonata and Sessions's knotty Duo. Composer Arthur Berger wrote in the Saturday Review that she gives the music "the kind of treatment the big names reserve for the 

standard classics. The Sessions work, which I had always regarded as an over-restless, tense piece, is invested with just the right amount of repose - revealing intrinsic beauties I had only vaguely suspected it of having. The Ives, by contrast, which has been played in a rambling fashion, ruminating over the hymn-tune and the country-dance, takes on remarkable shape in her reading."

These works were perhaps a relief after the showpieces that typically are allotted to the child virtuoso. Perhaps remarkably, perhaps not considering what shows up on YouTube, you can see the 20-year-old Travers perform a bit of the Carmen Fantasy in a 1948 German newsreel.

Travers never did explain her "disappearance." It is left for us to speculate, and I will only note my own opinion that no one should be induced to give up their childhood and adolescence to public performance and scrutiny, which can deplete the resources of even the most well-adjusted adult.

Her cohort on this 10-inch LP is the well-known accompanist Otto Herz. The sound is excellent. This is Travers's only recording, save for the Dello Joio.

Note (November 2024): this has now been remastered in ambient stereo. The download includes complete scans and contemporary reviews.

LINK to Ives and Sessions