Buy it... without hesitation if you are a Miklós Rózsa collector and wish to hear his superior output right up to the final years of his career.

Avoid it... if the style of Rózsa's Golden Age romanticism in a late 1970's film doesn't compute with your digital era ears.

Fedora/Crisis: (Miklós Rózsa) There are parallels to be drawn between the convoluted plot of Fedora and the actual, real-life circumstances surrounding the end of director Billy Wilder and composer Miklós Rózsa's collaboration in 1978. The film was Wilder's attempt to recapture the success of the concept behind his classic Sunset Boulevard several decades earlier. Once again, an aging actress is an elusive recluse, living on an island under a false identity. So obsessed with her beauty from Hollywood's Golden Age, the actress passes off her daughter as herself, even forcing her daughter to accept an honorary Oscar while she pretends to be the mother. A washed up director played by a frail-looking William Holden (once again from Sunset Boulevard) attempts to rekindle a working collaboration with the actress and falls into the mystery that tragically ends with daughter committing suicide and the real actress dying peacefully as a fictitious countess of the island. Quite sick. The film was a monumental failure, identified by critics as a last desperate attempt by Wilder, who was in failing health himself, to resurrect his reputation. He even went so far as to employ the services of Rózsa once again, with whom he had experienced a personal disagreement for decades since their original collaborations earned both great recognition. Rózsa was also in the final years of his career, though while physical ailments would keep him from film score production, he would continue to write concert music through the 1980's. Less than half a dozen scores would follow Fedora for Rózsa, including the remarkable Time After Time, though the quality of his work never significantly declined in his final efforts. One of the most interesting aspects of Rózsa's career is that he never altered the style of composition that he established in the 1940's, even in the post-Star Wars era of bravado and synthesizers. His score for Fedora, to the delight of his longtime collectors, retains the same styles of thematic structures that most of his scores had maintained for a lifetime.

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In most regards, Fedora is a score from the Golden Age recorded with better technical precision in the late 1970's, making Rózsa's styles more accessible to Digital Age listeners. And there's plenty to hear in Fedora, with Rózsa expertly devising themes for each character and manipulating them as the mystery unfolds. The merging of themes for the aging actress and her daughter is masterfully realized in such cues as "Metamorphosis" and "Oscar." Both cues represent the more cheery side of the relationship, especially the latter, which is a triumphant highlight cue late in Rózsa's career. A brooding, forceful theme for Holden's character is perhaps more creative in its ability to wait and stew, though even this makes use of the same lush instrumentation as the rest of the score. Even in its darker moments (the brutal "Butcher!"), Rózsa's touch is undeniably melodramatic in his trademark layered strings and woodwinds solos. The art of the Golden Age fanfare is not neglected either, with both the "Prelude" and "Finale" presenting outstanding brass announcements of high drama. Unfortunately for Rózsa, Wilder would realize sometime in the post-production process that the film wasn't going to work, and in all the drastic cuts that he made, much of Rózsa's score was either removed or inserted in the wrong places in the picture. This would greatly anger and disappoint Rózsa, and understandably so, since the music was obviously an appropriate throwback in the context of the film's story. Listeners would finally get to hear the full score on LP and CD from Varèse Sarabande. The 1989 CD was the second in the label's original Club series, limited to only 1,200 copies and retaining top value for Rózsa collectors not influenced by the CDr and wanting an original copy. Also on the CD was a suite of cues from Rózsa's 1950 score for Crisis, a film starring Cary Grant as an American brain surgeon kidnapped and forced to botch an operation on a Latin dictator (but who refuses and creates a nasty dilemma). It was noted as the only major studio film score performed by solo acoustic guitar, and while Rózsa's attempt at creativity is noble, the score is hardly an enjoyable listening experience... especially compared to the romantic and lush Fedora. The CD, regardless of Crisis at the end, is a necessary inclusion for any Rózsa collector.   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Fedora: ****
Crisis: *
Combination Album: ***