This CD is reissued by ArkivMusic.
Notes and Editorial Reviews
...The highly-coloured Genesis Suite was the product of music entrepreneur and composer-conductor Nathaniel Shilkret. It’s a luxury composite - a series of choral and orchestral musical panels. The Hollywood golden age East Coast complacent narration weaves in and out of the music. This high-flown Heston-style staginess works well and it’s very agreeable. You need to leave your cynicism at the hat-check... The Shilkret Creation is glowingly and glaringly scored in the film industry’s most extravagant style. Tansman - entrusted with the story of Adam and Eve - is largely in the same region with writing that touches on Ravel at his most Daphne verdant. Cain and Abel is a shorter movement from Milhaud - silver screen dusted but rustically
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reminiscent of his orchestral suites. Noah's Ark is the work of Castelnuovo-Tedesco whose concert idiom was a mete choice for this suite - he suited Shilkret’s project like a gold lamé glove. His Violin Concerto No. 2 recorded by Heifetz and Perlman is entitled The Prophets. The contented Covenant panel is by Toch and is as short a movement as that by Milhaud. In this land there are as yet none of the troublous thoughts encountered by Job. It ends in a magnificence of fanfares. Babel is by Stravinsky. Not only can you hear the whole suite on the Naxos/Gerard Schwarz reconstruction of the Genesis Suite. It is also included in the major box of Sony’s complete works with the narrator there being John Colicos. Unsurprisingly there is more tension, punchiness and angularity in this writing. There’s more of that to come in Schoenberg’s concluding Postlude. Shilkret clearly knew no fear when choosing such uncompromising figures for the commission... [A] virile and vivacious result... The scoring is cinematically opulent...
-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International
reviewing this performance reissued as Pristine 306
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Works on This Recording
1.
Genesis Suite by Various
Performer:
Edward Arnold (Spoken Vocals)
Conductor:
Werner Janssen
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Chorus,
Janssen Symphony Orchestra
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1944-1945
Date of Recording: 1946
Venue: Hollywood, California, USA
Length: 49 Minutes 57 Secs.
2.
Genesis Suite: no 1, Prelude, Op. 44 by Arnold Schoenberg
Conductor:
Werner Janssen
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Chorus,
Janssen Symphony Orchestra
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1945; USA
3.
Genesis Suite: no 2, Creation by Nathaniel Shilkret
Performer:
Edward Arnold (Spoken Vocals)
Conductor:
Werner Janssen
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Chorus,
Janssen Symphony Orchestra
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1945
4.
Genesis Suite: no 3, Adam and Eve by Alexandre Tansman
Performer:
Edward Arnold (Spoken Vocals)
Conductor:
Werner Janssen
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Chorus,
Janssen Symphony Orchestra
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1944
5.
Genesis Suite: no 4, Cain and Abel by Darius Milhaud
Performer:
Edward Arnold (Spoken Vocals)
Conductor:
Werner Janssen
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Chorus,
Janssen Symphony Orchestra
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1945
6.
Genesis Suite: no 5: The Flood "Noah's Ark" by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Performer:
Edward Arnold (Spoken Vocals)
Conductor:
Werner Janssen
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Chorus,
Janssen Symphony Orchestra
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1945
7.
Genesis Suite: no 6, The Covenant "The Rainbow" by Ernst Toch
Performer:
Edward Arnold (Spoken Vocals)
Conductor:
Werner Janssen
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Chorus,
Janssen Symphony Orchestra
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1945
8.
Genesis Suite: no 7, Babel by Igor Stravinsky
Performer:
Edward Arnold (Spoken Vocals)
Conductor:
Werner Janssen
Orchestra/Ensemble:
Chorus,
Janssen Symphony Orchestra
Period: 20th Century
Written: 1944; USA
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