HOLDRIDGE. Film themes suite. Elegy for harp and strings. Scenes of summer.

ROZSA. Concerto for viola and orchestra, Op.

37'. 'Maria Newman (va); Nuremberg Sym phony Orchestra /Richard Kaufman. Colos seum (E, GJCST34 8048 (65 minutes: DDD).

MiklOs ROzsa composed his Viola Concerto in 1979, following the advice of his old chum Piatigorsky, who suggested he write something for Pinchas Zukerman. Although Zukerman gave the premiere, this is the first recording. ROzsa was then working on the score for Alain Resnais's Providence, a film he describes in his autobiography, Double Life, as having music "like a nostalgic reminiscence of my youth ... musique grise". Something of the same mood permeates this concerto—the origins of R6zsa's music lay in folk-song, which, he claimed, made his unaccompanied instrumental pieces successful as descendants of pure folk-song. The solo part in this concerto bears traces of this traditional element, though some of its scoring is as lush as much of ROzsa's film music (think of the paranoia theme and concerto from Hitchcock's Spellbound). Maria Newman, the soloist, tackles the long part—the opening moderato assai is a 14-minute virtuoso battle with several unaccompanied passages demanding bravura technique. I doubt if ROzsa himself would thank the record company for the title, "Symphonic Hollywood", as he has always striven to keep his film and concert music apart. It seems there is no escape, however, for Maria Newman is the daughter of Alfred, composer of the TwentiethCentury Fox fanfare.

Lee Holdridge's Film themes suite is a piece that would once have been an ideal item to be featured on the BBC's Light Programme. It is a characteristic of the most effective film music that it should intrude on the consciousness only to add mood— that it sounds slightly familiar is an advantage. The theme from a Mexican documentary Pueblo del Sol is a Tchaikovsky-style waltz, the main theme from East of Eden (not the James Dean film, but a 1981 remake) a country-style ballad.

Floldridge's Elegy for harp and strings started as music for a TV film, Gemini Man; like the Scenes of summer, it is programme mood music, soporific, reassuring. PATRICK O'CONNOR.

KABALEVSKY. Symphonies—No. 1 in C sharp minor, Op. 18; No. 2 in C minor, Op. 19.

Szeged Philharmonic Orchestra / Ervin Acel.

Olympia 0 OCD268 (49 minutes: DDD).

Kabalevsky seems destined to be remembered for his user-friendly piano music and listenerfriendly concertos. But he did also compose four symphonies, the first three of them in one creative burst in his mid-twenties, and if it is difficult to hear them as intrinsically anything more than promising, a certain historical interest nevertheless attaches to them.

Dating from 1932 and 1934 (No. 3, the Lenin Requiem was completed before No. 2) the first two symphonies coincide with the beginnings of the Union of Soviet Composers and a brief window of opportunity between domination by militant proletarian factions and by party diktat. Not that long out of the conservatoire, Kabalevsky was perhaps not fully equipped to take advantage of the situation, though his inclinations had previously been towards the modernist rather than the proletarian end of the musico-political spectrum.

In style, structure and general gravitas both symphonies owe a massive debt to his teacher Miaskovsky, and neither work is free from a certain amount of note-spinning. But Kabalevsky is his own man to the extent of deploying open tonal schemes—the First Symphony is "in C sharp minor" but concludes in A major; the Second moves from C minor to E flat major. And every once in a while the academic frame quivers under the pressure of an overriding communicative urge—as when a fateful march with thudding bass drum overshadows the First Symphony's first movement coda (from 8'30"). Had the times been more propitious perhaps Kabalevsky would have been able to forge more wholly personal statements along such lines. As it was he abandoned symphonic composition until 1956, when his Fourth Symphony could have been a declaration of new possibilities (though in the event it wasn't).

Some may know the Second Symphony from a New Philharmonia recording on Unicorn (4/78— nla); the new Hungarian performance, recorded in March this year, is no less sympathetic and only occasionally less polished, and the recording is clear enough. It is, however, rather less urgent in feel—the outer movements are, after all, marked quasi presto and prestissimo scherzando. This may partly account for the generally lacklustre impression. But for the restoration of this work, and especially for the addition of the First Symphony, Olympia deserve our gratitude. D.J.F.