Humoresque Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, violin; Judy Blazer, vocals; Leslie Stifelman, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, Andrew Litton, conductor (Nonesuch)
Today’s Hollywood cinema couldn’t care less about classical music. But it was quite a different tune in the 1930s and ’40s, when serious concert music not only mattered to filmmakers but occasionally was integral to their plotlines.
Case in point: director Jean Negulesco’s 1946 Warner Brothers melodrama, “Humoresque,” starring John Garfield as a concert violinist from the wrong side of the tracks and Joan Crawford as his wealthy patron and mistress. Not only did composer Franz Waxman arrange various popular classics (including “The Flight of the Bumblebee” and the Dvorak ditty that gave the movie its title) into sound-bytes for the film, he also spun his own musical fantasies on themes from Bizet’s “Carmen” and Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” Isaac Stern was the “ghost” fiddler on the soundtrack.
Here we have a brand-new re-creation of that soundtrack, newly recorded by Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. In the accompanying booklet, she tells us how much the film touched her as a young musician (” `Humoresque’ is home for all my emotions as a musician and a woman,” she writes.) She fiddles with silken schmaltz and is supported with like dedication by Litton’s Londoners. The high-class kitsch of Waxman’s “Tristan” Fantasie–apparently a first recording–is worth the price of admission.
In sum, this concept album is good fun all the way, enjoyable even for those who do not share Salerno-Sonnenberg’s nostalgia for this particular example of 1940s Tinseltown camp.
