Rozsa: Three Choral Suites - Ben Hur, Quo Vadis, King of Kings

by Bruce Eder Miklós Rózsa was known for many fine kinds of music across a composing career that lasted from the 1930s until the 1980s -- great orchestral works that ended up in the repertories of some of the top conductors of his day, including Bruno Walter, Charles Munch, and Leonard Bernstein; elegant movie scores associated with such high-profile, glittering productions as The Four Feathers (1939) and Madame Bovary (1952); and other scores woven around dark, often doom-laden crime dramas such as The Killers (1946) and The Naked City (1947). But if there was one category of music and movie score in which he commanded not only the screen but the affections of a large segment of the public beyond the ranks of serious filmgoers and cinéastes, it was religious films. Starting with Quo Vadis in 1951 and culminating at the other end of the decade with his music for Ben-Hur (1959), with the score for King of Kings (1961) virtually appended to the latter project, Rózsa's musical underscoring for religious films virtually defined the genre -- indeed, the choral sections of the Ben-Hur score took on a life of their own in university choir performances very quickly after the movie's release, and proved among the composer's most popular concert works. Near the end of his life, Rózsa began preparing new suites of the music for all three movies, but was only able to partly complete them before his death. The finished works are presented here, in state-of-the-art sound by Erich Kunzel & the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir -- the performances are impeccable and, while there's no shortage of other recordings of this music, including those by Rózsa himself in the case of Ben-Hur and King of Kings (an expanded reissue of the King of Kings soundtrack was released but is now out of print and hard to find; there is something to be said for the composer's choices in these summaries of the scores. The sound is lustrous, and the performance by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is up to their usual extraordinarily high standard, but even the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra rises to the occasion. Additionally, for those who are set up for SACD and surround-sound, the Super-Audio version of this CD puts you right in the front row, in terms of spreading and reshaping the sound, and in even crisper, brighter terms. Additionally, the Quo Vadis material is especially valuable on its own terms, as no original soundtrack of that movie exists (the music session masters were damaged decades ago).