Hungarian-born composer Miklos Rósza became among the most successful of the Europeans who lent their talents to Hollywood cinema, scoring Ben-Hur among many other familiar films. His concert works are somewhat less numerous than his more than 100 film scores, and few would even claim the two works recorded here as the finest examples among those. Yet they're uncommon pieces that hold plenty of interest for fans of this composer. The Concerto for viola and orchestra, Op. 37, and Hungarian Serenade, Op. 25, represent respectively the end and the beginning of
Rósza's compositional career; the Hungarian Serenade, though it reached its final form in 1952, was the product of a series of revisions of much earlier music. The Hungarian quality emphasized by annotator Frank K. DeWald is more in evidence in the serenade's shorter movements than in the viola concerto, and both pieces are in a late Romantic language distinguished by degree of dissonance, but not by a fundamental difference in style from the composer's film scores. The Concerto for viola and orchestra, written in 1979 for
Pinchas Zukerman, has an opening movement of sustained inspiration, with the solo instrument entering with a profound, solemn melody after the orchestra establishes a prevailing murky atmosphere.
Rósza set the work aside to compose music for films, and, he said, "When I came to take it up again somehow the spell was broken." The reader does not learn from the booklet which parts were composed before this occurred, but it would seem to have been the opening movement that drew on a spell and still casts one. The Hungarian Serenade will be of interest to film music fans tracing the influence of Eastern European traditions on the Hollywood language, and the little-known Hungarian musicians involved do this music full justice. The sound, produced at the studios of Hungarian radio in Budapest, is unusually good among Naxos releases of Eastern European origin.