The year 2022 ended on a high note for composer Dimitri Tiomkin.

The release of Dimitri Tiomkin: Albertina Rasch & The Great American Ballet by Intrada in December brought the music of Tiomkin, already among the greatest of Hollywood film composers, to classical music lovers. Taking into account the 2019 landmark recording, Paris Under the Stars: Ballet Music for Albertina Rasch, also from Intrada, Tiomkin’s work should rank alongside that of Aaron Copland—when the two shared a concert experience in 1928, it was Tiomkin’s name in large block letters that dominated the billboards plastered across Paris—a composer who also wrote film music.

As Warren M. Sherk writes in the CD booklet for the 2022 recording, “That this music was not previously recorded, and that it took a label that specializes in soundtracks to record and release it, speaks volumes about the divide between concert and film music that plagued the 20^th century. As we move through the twenty-first century, may Dimitri Tiomkin’s music continue to reach new audiences through recordings such as this one and may it transcend categorization.”

Also in December, Gramophone, the venerable classical music magazine in the UK, selected the soundtrack for It’s a Wonderful Life, the 1946 film scored by Dimitri Tiomkin, for the magazine’s “Top 10 Christmas Blockbuster Soundtracks.”

Of the 10 films, It’s a Wonderful Life has the honor of being the oldest. Eight of the 10 picks are from 1982 to the present. Scrooge (1951) is the only other pre-1982 film on list.

Once in a while we stumble across something related to Dimitri Tiomkin’s music, often by chance. Orchestrator Patrick Russ shares his recent discovery of recordings by Swedish vocalist Ulla Billquist of two songs by Tiomkin from The Great Waltz, recorded a year after the release of the film in 1938. The tracks on YouTube at the links below are from Den Kompletta Ulla Billquist 1938-1939 (The Complete Ulla Billquist 1938-1939), issued in 2010 by Vax Records.

Radio audiences in Stockholm in the mid-1930s might have been familiar with Billquist, thrice married, first to an actor, then director, and finally to a composer/pianist. She was associated with handful of films in the 1940s, as an actress or singer, notably performing “Min Soldat” (My Soldier) used in Vi mötte Stormen [In the Eye of the Storm] (1943).

    One Day When We Were Young

I’m In Love with Vienna

And, new to us, Kari Kirkland sings “Wild Is the Wind” on her 2021 album of the same name. Her performance of the Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington song from Wild Is the Wind brings forth another interpretation beyond those of David Bowie (The story behind ‘Wild Is The Wind’), Nina Simone (‘Wild Is the Wind’: Nina Simone’s Typically Genre-Crossing Proclamation), and Johnny Mathis.

Last calendar year the top five countries visiting this webstite were:

1. United States
2. United Kingdom
3. Brazil
4. France
5. China

May the music of Dimitri Tiomkin continue to resonate with film and music lovers around the globe.