Dimitri Tiomkin: From New York to Hollywood: Music for Albertina Rasch and Classic Films by Dimitri Tiomkin, featuring conductor Richard Kaufman and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, is now available from Intrada on compact disc.

This remarkable recording brings together for the first time selected music Tiomkin composed largely in a two-decade period from 1929 to 1949. His destiny as a film composer was never guaranteed and the first music you will hear on the recording dates from the time he was living in New York and writing music for the ballets of his wife, choreographer Albertina Rasch. Until opportunity knocked and the ballets for vaudeville theaters and New York stages were left behind when Rasch and Tiomkin moved on to film the ballets on the stages of Hollywood in the early days of sound. When Tiomkin arrived in Hollywood to write music for the filmed ballets of Rasch—three are featured on the recording, “Fashion,” “Swan,” and “Moon”—he was still best known as a concert pianist.

Drawing on his experience playing in a piano duo that had him creating arrangements of classical music, he became adept at adapting classical music (Chopin, Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov heard herein) for ballet, and later, films. In fact, the premiere recording of Chopiniana, featuring Lynda Cochrane at the piano, is worth the price of the entire recording. It is a case-study and tour-de-force wherein Tiomkin inserts himself cleverly channeling Chopin with a bit of a Gershwinesque twist that more than hints at the showmanship he brought to his early music arrangements.

But that’s not all. His pivot to becoming a full-time composer also included penning original music, again, first for ballet and the concert hall, and then for films. The suites from Lost Horizon, The Great Waltz, and It’s a Wonderful Life offer brilliant snapshots of his early work in the latter field. One of the orchestrators for the final track from D.O.A. was Herb Taylor.

Soon after that track was written in 1949, Herb Taylor with his wife, June, embarked on a second career when the couple formed Taylor Food Hobbies. Incorporated as Taylor Food Products in 1961, Mr and Mrs T® would become an international brand based largely on the success of their Bloody Mary Mix. (Read the fascinating story in our two-part feature article, skip to Part 2 if you’re more interested in Bloody Marys than biographical details.) Lower the blinds and have a toast to the Taylors and Tiomkin while dancing to “Fisherman’s Jive.” A snippet of the piece is captured in the trailer promoting the recording on YouTube.

Tiomkin’s creativity flowed through his hand as pencil met paper in a hurried penmanship that arrangers and orchestrators immediately recognized as being from the hand of the “Great One,” as he was dubbed in a Russian publication distributed in China in 1929. (See Behind the photograph: Ballet at the Beach? Dimitri Tiomkin at the Piano)

Olivia Tiomkin Douglas commissioned the project, and producer Patrick K. Russ made the selections and, along with Paul Henning, orchestrated the music from the original scores in The Dimitri Tiomkin Collection at the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library.

The executive producer for Intrada is Roger Feigelson and Intrada’s founding producer, Douglass Fake (1952–2024) is credited since the recording commenced in 2023. The recording venue, Scotland’s Studio in Glasgow, welcomed the musicians on September 12 and 13, and again on February 22, 2024.

Paired with the related and previous Intrada releases, Dimitri Tiomkin: Paris Under the Stars: Ballet Music for Albertina Rasch and Dimitri Tiomkin: Albertina Rasch & The Great American Ballet: Piano Music for Concert and Stage, the latter with pianist Cochrane, enthusiasm and joy pervade this recording which sheds new light on the compositional output of Dimitri Tiomkin.

Intrada CD release INT 7191. Order here.