ROZSA. FILM MUSIC. Extracts from: Knight without Armour; Tribute to a Badman; The Asphalt Jungle; Moonfleet; Double Indemnity; Lust for Life; Men of the Fighting Lady. Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mikl6s R6zsa. Polydor 2383 384 (£3.25); 0 3170 284 (3-59).

Am I alone in thinking it slightly ironic that there should now be so many records of scores which MiklOs ROzsa has composed for films— which for all their graphic quality depend for their full effect on their visual associations— while we are still without recordings of his major concert works, written for the ear alone ? Not that I wish to look this particular gift horse in the mouth: R6zsa's gift for writing vivid, opulent music for large orchestra is well known, and the present collection, even if it does not significantly enlarge our knowledge of him, affords further evidence of his superb craftsmanship.

Here the range of styles, performed with panache by the RPO under the composer (who is no mean conductor) and full-bloodedly recorded, covers a surging seascape (Fritz Lang's Moonfleet), the tensions of city gangsterism (Asphalt Jungle, in which Marilyn Monroe made her debut) and of the rescue of a fighter pilot blinded in mid-air (Men of the Fighting Lady, one of ROzsa's most brilliant pieces of violent writing), a rare excursion into Americana (the Cagney Western known here as The Bad and the Beautiful), and the sinister (Billy Wilder's great film Double Indemnity, the score for which became a cause caebre when the studio's musical director rejected it for what he considered its excessive dissonance). Perhaps best of all are the suites from the earliest and latest films on this disc: Knight without Armour, with which ROzsa began his film career in 1937—more or less by chance, as the very full and informative sleeve-note explains—and which, in the station waiting-room scene between Dietrich and Donat, showed him at his most lyrical; and the 1956 Lust for Life, which begins with an attractive summer pastoral (paying suitable homage to Ravel) and ends most poetically after a score of "sensuous sheen and luminous elegance" (in Christopher Palmer's words) suggesting the "blinding impact of the Provençal sun".

L.S.