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On-demand interviews with local and national classical music artists.

Daniel Hope - Escape to Paradise

Hollywood is the land of our dreams. But as we listen to star violinist Daniel Hope explore that land, our perceptions begin to change. He shows us that the “Hollywood Sound” has its own history – and indeed sprang from the events of history. There, in the LA dream factory, composers in exile dug their hopes out of their luggage and repackaged them in music, composing soundtracks to great movies about humanity brought low by fate or lifted up by the American Dream.

For this new album, Daniel Hope sets out on a widescreen journey into history and sound, providing us with another fascinating glimpse into the past through the prism of music. Having focused in previous releases on works banned by the Third Reich and composers murdered by the Nazis, he now turns to the music of those who managed to escape to the USA, painting a vivid aural picture of how the anguish they experienced in leaving their old culture behind and their longing for a better future became the basis for the Hollywood Sound. His illuminating selection reveals the arc that stretches from Erich Wolfgang Korngold to the scores for later film classics such as Schindler’s List and Cinema Paradiso.

Hope’s point of departure is Korngold’s Violin Concerto, which he got to know from performances by the “King of Violinists”, Jascha Heifetz – himself an earlier émigré to Hollywood. Korngold arrived in the USA in 1934 and went to work for Warner Bros., soon picking up a pair of Oscars: for Anthony Adverse (1937) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1939). In Daniel Hope’s eyes, his passionately dreamy Violin Concerto represents all the hopes and dreams that have always been the stuff of cinema, that opulent world of escapism. And that astute observation shines through the music here.

The violinist also lends an ear to the musical echoes of 1930s Europe, revisiting the cabarets and revues of Berlin and Vienna. He is joined by Sting for “The Secret Marriage”, the pop star’s version of a song by Hanns Eisler to which he wrote his own lyrics back in 1987 (the original, “An den kleinen Radioapparat”, featured lyrics by Brecht), and by German singer phenomenon Max Raabe for Kurt Weill’s “Speak Low”.

Hope also presents music from Eric Zeisl’s unfinished opera Job, based on the novel of the same name by Joseph Roth which itself tells the story of a man who flees from Europe to the USA. And suddenly it becomes clear that the development of music from Wagner and Mahler to Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School, Korngold and Zemlinsky continued in the movie studios of Hollywood. There, however, the exiled composers were obliged to give up any notions of writing twelve-tone music in favour of the newly fashionable American brand of pathos, and to exchange the world of Viennese waltzes for that of love stories and the Wild West. Flight always entails leaving old traditions behind – something that has personal associations for Daniel Hope, whose maternal grandparents fled Hitler’s Germany for South Africa, and whose parents then fled the apartheid regime for England.

His journey on this new album brings him to the present day. As well as excerpts from Miklós Rózsa’s classic scores for Ben-Hur and El Cid, he has also included music from three more recent films that deal with the themes of escape and flight: Schindler’s List, scored by Korngold heir John Williams; American Beauty, soundtrack by Thomas Newman; and, of course, Cinema Paradiso, that ode to movie escapism in which Ennio Morricone’s music plays such a key role.

Hope’s celebration of the “Hollywood Sound” concludes with a final echo of the past, as he plays Herman Hupfeld’s song “As Time Goes By”, immortalised in Casablanca – another classic silver-screen portrayal of key moments in the lives of people compelled to flee by events beyond their control.

--Axel Brüggemann