John Mauceri continues his exploration of Hollywood's musical past with this entertaining programme of music from movies that deal with various manifestations of horror, from giant monsters and diabolical intervention to far less visible psychological phenomena. The disc opens imaginatively with a brief dialogue excerpt from the soundtrack of The Phantom of the Opera (the 1925 Lon Chaney version that was reissued four years later with sound effects and music) synchronized to a new recording of the background score, but rather more familiar are the excerpts from Jurassic Park, Vertigo and The Omen, though Mauceri's readings are not particularly distinctive.
He fares much better with Max Steiner's bold, dramatic Overture to King Kong written specifically for the film's 1933 premiere, Rozsa's richly romantic Spellbound Concerto (heard here in a lengthier, more restrained and beautifully shaded performance than is customary, led by a fluent contribution from Stephen Hough that fully merits the ''Bravo!'' expressed by the composer just as the music dies away) and, most notably, the two Waxman suites, both of which differ in several fascinating ways from the performances already recorded. Sunset Boulevard, for example, has been edited by Mauceri himself and at 13'45'' is almost twice as long as the Gerhardt version for RCA (11/91). The lush but appropriately noir-ish sourness of this Oscar-winning score (which clearly influenced David Cullen's superb orchestrations for Lloyd Webber's stage version of the film) is never less than compelling here, whilst the vivid suite from the 1941 adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, though recorded several years ago by Stanley Black (Silva Screen, 4/89), is arguably more impressive in Mauceri's hands, particularly in the sequence where a distant chorus sing ''You should see me dance the polka'' in counterpoint with the unsettling phrases describing Jekyll's transformation into his evil alter-ego. Once again the warmth of the old MGM sound stage provides a reliably beefy and sympathetic acoustic.'