Tag: Basil Rathbone

What the hell happened to Hollywood? As those of us who remember “the way it used to be” brace ourselves for another year of insipid red carpet banter, I thought we’d take a look back, this Sunday morning on WPRB, and revisit a lost era of glamour and dreams by way of recordings of music from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

Join me for highlights from a concert originally broadcast on CBS Television back in 1963. The program, “Music from Hollywood,” was made up of classic film scores mostly conducted by the composers themselves at the Hollywood Bowl. These included “How the West Was Won” (Alfred Newman), “Laura” (David Raksin), “Cleopatra” (Alex North), “Raintree County” (Johnny Green), “A Place in the Sun” (Franz Waxman), “North by Northwest” (Bernard Herrmann), “High Noon” (Dimitri Tiomkin), and “Ben-Hur” (Miklos Rozsa). You couldn’t find that much compositional talent in Hollywood now if you tried.

We’ll also hear a rare 1938 recording of selections from Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Academy Award winning music from “The Adventures of Robin Hood,” with Sir Guy of Gisborne himself, Basil Rathbone, the narrator, and Korngold conducting.

And Sir Thomas Beecham will take the podium for award-winning music by Brian Easdale written for the unnerving Powell-Pressburger classic, “The Red Shoes.”

Get ready to steel yourself for the Oscars with relics of bygone quality, this Sunday morning from 7 to 11 EST, on WPRB 103.3 FM and wprb.com. At what point did they call “class dismissed,” wonders Classic Ross Amico?