There are two CDs from the Naxos Film Music Classics that have caught my attention. One features the music by Bernard Hermann, who composed the scores for The Snows of Kilimanjaro and 5 Fingers featured on this CD. These were 1952 films with big name casts. Hermann, a prolific film score composer, also composed the music for Jane Eyre, which featured Orson Welles. It is Welles who first enticed Hermann to the medium of film by asking him to compose the score for Citizen Kane. Prior to that they worked together in radio, where Hermann composed the music for War of the Worlds, the infamous radio drama that caused panic throughout North America when it was aired.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro starred Gregory Peck and Rita Hayworth. The story begins at the end, so to speak, as it recalls various stages in the life of Harry Street, the character portrayed by Peck. This film offered a great challenge to Hermann, who had been the conductor of the CBS Symphony, which was disbanded in 1950. One can sense Hermann= s classical training throughout this score, which embodies a wide range of themes: action, young love, tragic love, mature love, as well as music that reveals to us the mysteries of Africa. 5 Fingers starred James Mason, servant and spy, who sells secrets to the Nazis for money rather than ideology. The background for this film is Istanbul, and Hermann created one of his darkest scores ever for this film. If one listens closely, one can sense this score as being a subtle introduction to the composer= s later scores for Alfred Hitchcock.

Both of these scores are performed on this CD by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra under William Stromberg. Excellently played, the orchestra shows that Stromberg understands this kind of music. He grew up in California in a family of filmmakers, which developed in him an early love for this kind of score. As a listener, one is drawn to the music for many reasons, but perhaps most of all because it has become part of our popular culture, while at the same time has this classical undertone that lifts it beyond the 'simply popular'.

The second CD features Dmitry Shostakovich's score for the 1929/31 sound/silent film Odna (Alone), which here has been reconstructed by Mark Fitz-Gerald. Performed by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra under Fitz-Gerald, it also features soprano Irina Mataeva, mezzo Anna Kiknadze and tenor Dmitry Voropaev. This film was set in 1920s Leningrad and in the Altai Mountains. The story is about a female teacher who moves to the outlying area of the Mongolian Soviet Union to bring the people there into the 'glorious' world of the Soviets. She has to overcome many obstacles, including deep-seated superstitions. It is very much a Soviet film, but it gives us a hard-to-resist Shostakovich score that overcomes all of the usual Soviet constrictions placed on artists of all types during this period.

What makes this CD so special is that Shostakovich's original score was thought lost forever, but through painstaking research by conductor Fitz-Gerald, in close consultation with Shostakovich's widow, Irina, it has now been reconstructed. It is an engaging, lively, sometimes bombastic score, that reveals to us the master that was Shostakovich.

Like the Hermann scores, this CD attracts one's attention because it both from the popular realm and also from what we so liberally call classical, meaning not the Classic period, but 'legitimate' music, a term borrowed from the theater.

Both CDs offer excellent value at a cost of $9.90 each, good sound, and in the case of the Shostakovich CD, expressive voices to bring the music alive.