Music For Wargames - Some Samples

Click here to read the introduction to Music for Wargames.

1. "Marches Militaires Francaises" - Francois-Jean Brun, conductor; Band of La Garde Republicaine, Paris. This classic anthology of French military music has long been a choice collectors' item. The music surveyed dates from 1789 to 1945, with the emphasis, obviously, going to Napoleon, that master of Militarism's High Baroque style, starting with a substantial march by the interesting mainstream composer Mehul; our favorite is the band's rendition of the solemn, slow-paced Foreign Legion anthem, Marche Lorraine. The ensemble is a famous one, and the performances are surely idiomatic as well as stirring. Recording venue was the Theatre des Champs Elysees. It's mono only, of course (as everything was on Angel Records until about 1959), but very good mono. If you dig Napoleonic history, French culture, or just good marches, you will find this collection very rich and satisfying. Individual cuts are listed below. Have fun and Vivre La France!


2. Original soundtrack to "Air Power" - CBS's answer to NBC's smash hit, "Victory at Sea", this series didn't have the cumulative emotional wallop of V.A.S., but it did have some great footage. It also boasted Walter Cronkite as the narrator (always a touch of class) and a sterling musical score by American composer Norman Dello-Joio. Dello-Joio wasn't afraid to use movie-music clichés (temple gongs for shots of kamikaze pilots saying their final prayers; Cossack dances for Red Army maneuvers, the lot), but his lavish orchestration, first-rate melodic gift, and powerful sense of atmosphere generates a kind of all-purpose World War Two suite. The first recording, c. 1957, is still the best (Ormandy; Philadelphia Orchestra).


3. "The Battle of the Atlantic" - This soundtrack derives from an excellent BBC documentary never seen outside of the UK. It's every bit the equal to Victory at Sea. For example, the music depicting a convoy inching its way through pea-soup fog, the U-boats shadowing it every league of its journey, is chilling - you can almost feel the clamminess of the fog, the tension of the lookouts and gun crews, the helplessness of the crews ("No damn place out here to dig foxholes!"). The recorded suite culminates in a hymn to victory so stirring, so grandly Elgarian, it makes you want to sing "God save the King": a huge chorus slowly intones the victory anthem, joined at intervals by the full orchestra, the massed brass and percussion of the Band of the Royal Marines (recorded in-balcony for maximum spatial grandeur), and a solo soprano whose voice soars above the massive sound like a rocket. For our money, it's as grand and thrilling as anything by Mahler!


4. "The Battle of Naretva" - This is the only war movie Bernard Herrmann ever scored for - he did his greatest work for Hitchcock and Harryhausen, including the nerve-twisting score to "Psycho" and the fantastically atmospheric score for "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad".. But this Yugoslav Partisan epic was funded by Tito, who wanted the best and most of everything, so he hired Herrmann and Herrmann turned in a gem: dramatic, tragic, stirring, The music depicting the Partisans' great retreat, at the point in the war when their fortunes were at low ebb, is shatteringly powerful. Herrmann was a terrific conductor, and the unnamed studio orchestra (mostly moon-lighting members of the L.A. Philharmonic) plays the living daylights out of the score. Loud, crystal-clear, in-your-face stereo sonics make the LP an audiophile's delight (although the sound is a mite dry, as was customary with recordings made on certain sound-stages). PS: don't bother renting any DVD you find of this film - ALL the "export" versions were significantly cut, some by almost an hour, and if the movie's Balkan politics are bewildering to begin with, they're utterly impenetrable in the edited versions. Orson Welles, of all people, just sort of pops in and out of the story as a Croat Fascist tyrant, but his role in the overall plot is never explained (that part's been edited out!) - it's like he's wandering around looking for someone he can ask for directions to Belgrade… When we last checked, the only place you could order an un-cut print from was Belle and Blade Distributors, the ultimate war movie source (check out their web site, because they have some amazing films), and even they couldn't provide one with sub-titles, only in the original Serbo-Croatian! (Not that you can't figure out what's going on - the stupendous battle scenes alone are worth the effort!


5. Shostakovich: Symphony No. 7, ("Leningrad") -The great Russian composer began sketching this epic work while serving as a fire warden IN Leningrad, during the first, most gruesome winter of the siege. On Stalin's direct personal order, he was flown out of the dying city just after Christmas, 1941, and resettled in a safe location, where he finished orchestrating this monumental work in the summer of 1942. . Waragmers will especially groove on Movement I, where the composer depicts the relentless advance of the Nazi panzers by means of a banal, rather annoying little tune announced by the flute, then developed into a crushing, unstoppable crescendo by the full orchestra over the next 14 minutes, its power increasing incrementally with every moment. Stirring, too, is the finale, where winter darkness gradually yields to returning light (the siege is broken!) and a hymn of deliverance and victory slowly coalesces from fragmentary hints of the grand sweeping melody to come. Our source offers a half-dozen great performances (including the American premiere under Toscanini, a reading of operatic fervor, somewhat compromised by dated off-the-air sound). Our choice, though, is an obscure now out-of-print audiophile recording made by Yevgeny Svetlanov and the Stockholm Radio Symphony, not long before that conductor's death. What gives this reading such blinding excitement, we think, is the fact that Svetlanov actually lived through the siege, which was raised not long after his fourteenth birthday…and he never forgot what he saw. That searing recollection comes through in this recording as in no other. No other interpreter quite conveys the same sense of hard-won triumph at the end; it's music that transcends the time and place of its inspiration, and stands, now, as a monument to universal human courage and endurance.

Interested? Just email us and we'll arrange to have the complete listings from "Records in the attic" sent directly to you, and at our special bargain price, you shouldn't hesitate to avail yourself of their service!