MOST of us would consider such iconic films as The Wizard of Oz, High Society or Singin' in the Rain to be the ultimate classics of their genre. They belong to that Golden Age of the Hollywood musical that stretched from around 1927 to the mid-1960s. No expense was spared, the stars were godlike, but more than anything else, the music that underpinned them was as sumptuous and sugary as Hollywood could afford. And there was very little that studios like Metro Goldwyn Meyer (MGM) coul
But imagine the impossible. What if someone had been so careless as to misplace an entire library housing the only copies of the original film scores, leaving the soundtracks to such gems as The Wizard of Oz, Ben Hur, or even countless Tom and Jerry
cartoons as mere celluloid legacies? Nobody would be so stupid, would they?
Well, back in 1969 MGM was struggling. It was the biggest of the major studios, with matching overheads, and as a result was hit hardest by the drop in box-office income from declining cinema audiences and the growing competition from television.
Like other high-maintenance studios, it fell subject to corporate takeover. In came new chief executive, John Aubry, who decided the site currently occupied by the MGM music library would be better utilised as a car park. Rather than salvage, relocate, or even sell off the contents of this irreplaceable treasure, he opted for the cheapest alternative, which was to have the library bulldozed, and the entire edifice, contents and all, dumped in a landfill site.
Which is why Harold Arlem's original music for the The Wizard of Oz and Mikl"s R"zsa's for Ben Hur are among hundreds of MGM scores that lie rotting today underneath a Californian golf course.
All is not lost, though, thanks to the obsessive passion of Newcastle-born conductor, composer and arranger John Wilson. He, with the help of his Scots-based friend and collaborator, Andrew Cottee, has made it his mission to recreate as many as possible of these original soundtracks by the only remaining means possible – to listen to every single bar of the lost scores and laboriously write down every note he hears for every instrument that plays them. Some of the fruits of his efforts – extracts from the soundtracks to Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Ben Hur and Gigi – form part of next week's Christmas at the Movies programme by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra which Wilson himself conducts, and which is presented by BBC newsreader Jackie Bird.
Such an all-consuming project was never just a pipedream for this film-mad Geordie. It started ten years ago, when he was looking for the music for one of the big dance numbers from Cole Porter's High Society. For reasons that eventually became clear, he just couldn't source the original music.
"I realised I'd have to wear my other hat as an arranger," he recalls. "I discovered that, for copyright reasons, reduced piano scores had been deposited with the American Library of Congress. They provided the skeleton templates for me to reconstruct by ear the original orchestrations."
Warner Brothers (now owners of MGM's pre-1986 titles] continued to grant Wilson access to the source material and, a decade on, he has restored an astonishing 100 complete scores. "It's been a labour of love," he says. "I do it for nothing, but earn my money conducting them with orchestras all around the world."
He has ambitious plans to conduct five performances of the Wizard of Oz in Dublin, with a live orchestra playing to a version of the film that has had the recorded soundtrack removed, but maintained the original vocals. "Synchronising everything will be an enormous challenge," says Wilson. "But how many people can say they've done a gig with Judy Garland?"
But is it really worth the effort? After all, it's not as if other scored versions of those great Hollywood soundtracks don't exist – music by such legendary MGM composers as Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Jerome Kern.
But Wilson argues that the versions we hear on the films are unique, and as much to do with the "high-class assembly line" operation that existed among the big studios as with the composers themselves. "There are plenty of cases where the composer didn't actually put pen to paper," he explains.
"André Previn told me of occasions when, between studio rehearsals, he would rough something out spontaneously at the piano; an arranger would then take over, giving it the right number of bars for the film; then an orchestrator would score it out in typically plush, glamorous Hollywood fashion, before having it recorded by one of the best orchestras in the world. Each man in the line had his own speciality, and they were all brilliant at it."
In which case, are Wilson's efforts more aimed at preserving a stylised musical tradition than the unique legacy of specific composers? No, he argues, there's no question that the fingerprint of the original creator is fundamental to the value of these scores.
"Of the 400 which Scott Bradby created for Tom and Jerry, 71 were fortunately saved from destruction. I'm about to start work on the missing ones. They are amazing scores, bordering on the unplayable – completely virtuosic and brilliantly conceived."
Never mind paying him, Wilson should be given an Oscar for his efforts.
• John Wilson conducts the BBC SSO in Christmas at the Movies at Glasgow City Halls on 16 December, Ayr Town Hall on 20 December and Aberdeen Music Hall on 21 December
The full article contains 937 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
