Masters And Commanders

"Cincinnati Pops fans know that I am very fond of sailing, and they are familiar with our popular 'Victory At Sea' and 'Sailing' albums on the Telarc label," says Kunzel. "Our latest musical adventure, Masters and Commanders, tells all kinds of tales of the high seas and captures on one album film composers of different generations and styles."

Highlights from Masters and Commanders include Academy Award-winning composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Captain Blood Overture and Suite from Sea Hawk. Captain Blood, which was the legendary actor Errol Flynn's first starring role, also was Korngold's first original film score. Korngold's evocative cinematic scores set a benchmark for numerous film composers who followed, including John Debney, whose score for the 1995 film, Cutthroat Island, was dedicated in part to Korngold and Miklós Rózsa. The end title from Cutthroat Island is heard on Masters and Commanders, as well as Morton Gould's Main Title from Windjammer and Henry Mancini's "Arctic Whale Hunt" from The White Dawn.

Miklós Rózsa, of Ben-Hur fame, composed "The Mayflower" for the film, Plymouth Adventure, in 1952. Franz Waxman's film music is represented with the Overture to Anne of the Indies and Suite from Captains Courageous.

Hans Zimmer, considered a worthy successor to Korngold's symphonic idiom, scored big with Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and the earlier Crimson Tide. Three selections from Klaus Badelt's score from Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, also are included.

The recording also includes music by Elmer Bernstein (selections from The Buccaneer); Alfred Newman ("Conquest" from Captain from Castile); and Bronislau Kaper (Main Title from Mutiny on the Bounty). A Richard Tognetti arrangement of Luigi Boccherini's Los Manolos is included from Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, the 2003 film starring Russell Crowe.

This is the 84th Telarc recording by the Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. The most recent disc, Russian Nights, was praised in the March 2007 issue of Gramophone as "gorgeously played and sumptuously recorded." Recent Telarc/Pops discs also include The Never-Ending Waltz and Christmastime Is Here, both of which were released in the fall of 2006. In 2005, Telarc released Rósza: Three Choral Suites to great critical acclaim. The recording was a collection of composer Miklos Rósza's rearrangements of his original scores from three big-screen epics: Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis and King of Kings. Ken Smith wrote in Gramophone, "One would have to think hard to conceive of a more memorable performance of these works."