Steiner: King Kong.(Sound Recording Review)

Steiner: King Kong. William Stromberg, Moscow Symphony Orchestra. Naxos 8.557799.

When some of us think of the original 1933 movie "King Kong," it's of the gigantic gates that lead into the big ape's domain or the titanic struggle between the two giant dinosaurs or, heck, even Kong himself standing in chains on a Broadway stage. But I wonder how many of us remember the music, without which the whole affair would have been a mere shadow of itself.

Max Steiner is generally credited with having invented film music. He always shrugged it off, saying it was an idea originated with Richard Wagner. Well, Wagner may have championed the idea of musical motifs, but in the early 30s, film music was in its infancy. Sound had only just been added to movies a few years earlier, and filmmakers were anxious to find as much music as they could. Steiner's score for "Kong" was among the first (often cited as THE first) full-length scores with musical cues to underline specific segments of the story.

Steiner would go on to write many more classic film scores for things like "Gone With the Wind," "Now Voyager," "The Charge of the Light Brigade," "The Fountainhead," "The Big Sleep," The Treasure of the Sierra Madre," and "The Searchers." But it all started with "Kong."

Marco Polo gave us Steiner's complete film score for the movie in their 1996 recording, with the music reconstructed and restored by John Morgan, at which time I duly noted it in our pages. Now, movie buffs, monster-movie fans, and fanciers of film scores in general should be pleased that the same recording is offered at a bargain price on the parent Naxos budget label. If the higher price put you off before, here's your second chance.

In the accompanying booklet notes, John Morgan tells us that this recording "is not a recreation of the 1933 music tracks, but a musical performance of the complete score as Steiner's original sketches dictated. When we noted differences in the soundtrack as compared to the original sketches (whether added or subtracted bars, repeated ...