Program Notes

Two of Waxman’s finest film scores were among his last. In 1962, he composed “The Wishing Star” for “Taras Bulba” and “Rosanna” for “Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man.”

Nikolai Gogol’s drama of the cossacks’ fight for freedom in sixteenth-century Russia is the background for J. Lee Thompson and Harold Hecht’s production starring Yul Brynner and Tony Curtis.

Waxman received his tenth Best Score of the Year Academy Award nomination for this epic.

During “The Wishing Star” sequence in the film Andrei (Tony Curtis) and Natalia (Christine Kaufmann), daughter of the Polish Governor, meet secretly to declare their love.