Post
by Bernd.O.Rachold » Mon Jul 16, 2007 4:33 pm
Dear Korngoldians, please note the lines of Erich´s elder son Ernst Werner about this recording, in a letter to me dated April 3, 1991 (transl. from German by Dr. Kurt Arrer): ...Perhaps I can still hear my father´s tempos so well that most of the music on this CD seems too slow to me and therefore, in my opinion, this ruins the effect of this recording. Besides, RIAS hasn´t done a good job in putting this CD together properly because they didn´t know the film. At that time I tried to explain everything to John Scott because I thought he would be involved in the editing. When I found out that he had nothing to do with it, I hoped I could sit down with Varèse Sarabande and explain a few things to them. But that didn´t work because Varèse was not involved in the editing, either. I would have, for instance, omitted the pauses (between the takes). To me the march doesn´t make much sense, either, because it doesn´t have a real ending. In the film it is faded out because the marching players are leaving in the distance. It would have been very easy to achieve a similiar fade-out on the CD! An important, dramatic piece in the Alps is also missing because RIAS copied the parts of section A twice and therefore section B was never recorded. My only consolation is the fact that these mistakes are hardly obvious to someone who doesn´t know the film very well..." So let us enjoy the original music and conducting by the composer from the Warner-video 65221 and/or the Tsunami-CD 0143 (sorry, no cheap Membran-copy issued). By the way, the German premiere happened in TV (ZDF), mentioned above, as EIN RASTLOSES LEBEN (A Restless Life) at Nov. 1, 1991. The dubbing studio hasn´t enough original music at hand and used a lot of stock-music additionally, as usual in Germany, alas! ROBIN HOOD may be the only German dubbed Korngoldian film with complete original music. Bernd.-