Our Relations: The Lost Laurel & Hardy Music
Composer Leroy Shields played piano, led radio orchestras, penned semiclassical works, and, for a few years in the 1930s, wrote music for Hollywood. The Beau Hunks, a Dutch ensemble, have lovingly reconstructed Shield's score forOur Relations, a 1936 comedy starring Laurel and Hardy. Members of the Beau Hunks, joined by the Metropole Orchestra, perform the original sheet music for the film on this finely packaged and annotated CD. If you're a fan of old movies and some of this disc sounds vaguely familiar, there's a reason. Back in the '30s music editors cut up recordings of Shields's original score into manageable bits; some of the resulting parts were then used inOur Relationsand other films as well. On another note, it turns out that Shields's music can be tough to play. According to the album's liner notes, the longest track, "On the Dock," prompted Jan Stulen, the conductor on these sessions, to say, "Compared to this, Mahler's Ninth is like a flute sonata."--Fred Cisterna