Program Notes

Jules Dassin’s Film Noir classic, Night & The City (20th Century Fox, 1950), composed by Waxman in the same year as his Oscar winning score for Sunset Boulevard, is as intense and sardonic; hence the title of the concert work Nightride For Orchestra. A stark film about the wrestling racket in London stars Richard Widmark, Gene Tierney, Herbert Lom, Francis L. Sullivan and Hugh Marlowe. Tierney’s 27 costumes were designed by her husband Oleg Cassini.

The original version of Samuel G. Engel’s production of Night & The City marked the beginning of Waxman’s long association with Fox as a free lance composer; his first Hollywood assignment was at the studio as musical director of Erich Pommer’s production of Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II operetta Music in the Air (1934).