Program Notes

The music has been taken by Waxman from three motion pictures with a common theme – the opening of the western frontier of the United States for settlement by pioneers in the last half of the 19th century.

“The Pioneer Suite” opens with music from William Dieterle/John Farrow’s Red Mountain (Paramount, 1951) and follows the Alan Ladd character through the stormy period following the Civil War. With a change in mood, the music from Cimarron (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1960), directed by Anthony Mann, is heard. Based on Edna Ferber’s novel, the film chronicles the settlement of the Oklahoma territory in 1889 (as portrayed on screen by Glenn Ford, Maria Schell and Anne Baxter). The suite concludes with sweeping music from Andre De Toth’s The Indian Fighter (United Artists, 1955). In this western, the on screen characters, played by Kirk Douglas, Walter Matthau and Elsa Martinelli, search for gold leads them to find peace among the untamed beauty of the far west.