ERNESTO HALFFTER (1905-1989): Carmen.

Description: This 3-hour-plus silent film dating from 1926 was made by Jacques Feyder and starred the Spanish actress and popular singer Raquel Meller. Unlike Bizet's opera (and many of the 32 other Carmen films which preceded (!) it), Feyder follows the novella by Prosper Merimée much more closely and Halffter's score is full of the powerful emotions - love, jealousy, passion and violence - which were smoothed out and drained of intensity by Bizet's librettists. This is the first recording of a score only unearthed in the late 1990s by one of François Truffaut's former music consultants and it's certainly the only time an orchestra of the size specified in the score was able to be used (Halffter had maybe 50 players for the film's premiere). Using almost exclusively Andalusian folk music elements, the 21-year-old composer also ingeniously embeds several homages to the most important composers to him at the time: Debussy, Stravinsky (Carmen's dance is rather Rite of Springish in its heavy, powerful intensity), de Falla and Ravel. Just like in the good old Marco Polo film music CD days, there are plenty of notes: track-listings fitted with the action of the film, a note on the music track-by-track, a synopsis of the action in the film at each track, a big note on Carmen film adaptations and Feyder's especially, the history of the film since 1926, excerpts from a 1926 French magazine interview with Halffter and a short conductor's note on the problems and solutions of the score. Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra; Mark Fitz-Gerald.