John Mauceri - The Sound of Hollywood (2023) [Hi-Res]

The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra breathed new life into the orchestral pops repertoire, told new stories and brought in new audiences when it was revived under the conductor John Mauceri in the 1990s. At the centrepiece of this collection are all of the original HBO albums released by Philips from 1991-96.

From Gershwin to Ligeti, The Firebird to Edward Scissorhands, The Hollywood Bowl Orchestra breathed new life into the orchestral 'pops' repertoire, told new stories and brought in new audiences when it was revived under the conductor John Mauceri in 1990.

From the start, they played to capacity audiences at the Hollywood Bowl, where the Los Angeles Philharmonic had been giving concerts since 1922. Now reformed as a separate ensemble - 'the world's greatest pick-up band', auditioned by Mauceri and his colleagues from freelancers across the West Coast - the new Hollywood Bowl Orchestra played a huge repertoire of classical, contemporary, film and Broadway, and recorded the highlights for Philips.

The mastermind behind their artistic success and uniquely diverse repertoire was Mauceri, a protege of Leonard Bernstein, who had long worked with equal success in opera, the symphony and musical theatre. Mauceri made the connections that link Holst and Ravel to John Williams and Hans Zimmer, the Korngold and Schoenberg of Vienna to their later identities in California. He showed in sound as well as word how 'Golden Age' Hollywood film scores developed from the world of European late-Romanticism and modernism.

Mauceri and his colleagues dug deep into studio libraries to unearth the best, the most original and complete scores available for pieces such as The King and I and familiar 'standards' often heard in much later orchestrations. They worked with great singers from all backgrounds, including (featured in this set) Julia Andrews, Patti LuPone and Sylvia McNair. Each individual HBO album was curated by Mauceri to tell a familiar story - love scenes, nightmares, waltzes, the space age, the passing of a day - from an unexpected angle.

The box also includes Mauceri's Decca albums of My Fair Lady, starring Kiri Te Kanawa and Jeremy Irons, and 'Schoenberg in Hollywood' (part of the label's Entartete Musik series). A booklet essay by Peter Quantrill traces the genesis of the revived Hollywood Bowl Orchestra through Mauceri's reflections. Costa Pilavachi, who masterminded many of these recordings for Philips offers his own personal insights. Whichever side of the musical tracks you're from, 'The Sound of Hollywood' will take you on new journeys, to unfamiliar destinations.