Serenada Schizophrana

1	I. Pianos 7:00
2	II. Blue Strings 10:08
3	III. A Brass Thing 7:55
4	IV. The Quadruped Patrol 2:55
5	V. I Forget 6:23
6	VI. Bells and Whistles 8:07
7	VII. End Tag 0:51
8	Improv for Alto Sax 2:46

Barnes & Noble

Many of Hollywood's great film composers mastered the art of using music unobtrusively to underline a movie's drama and emotions. Danny Elfman can do this as well as the best of them, but often the most entertaining moments in his film scores are conspicuously hyperactive, the music coming to dominate and even propel the action. So it's no surprise that Elfman's Serenada Schizophrana, his first orchestral work written for a concert hall instead of a movie theater, has no trouble grabbing and sustaining the listener's attention through its eclectic six-movement span. It's something of a Concerto for Orchestra, giving each section of instruments a shot at the spotlight, from the piano solos of the opening movement through the mysterious "Blue Strings" and the stream-of-consciousness shifts of "A Brass Thing," where laid-back swing alternates in montage with more ominous rhythms. These may well be soundtracks for imaginary films -- the manic "Quadruped Patrol" is classic chase music, for instance -- but for the listener, it's refreshing to hear Elfman's work without images by Tim Burton or some other film director crowding the imagination. Surprisingly, one of the most satisfying parts of the Serenada is also its least cinematic: "I Forget" is a beautifully arranged vocal setting of a Spanish text, which suggests that Elfman is just as capable of responding to the inspiration of words as to images. With a great deal of music in a recognizably "Elfmanesque" style, fans of his film work will find much to enjoy here, but you don't have to be a soundtrack collector to appreciate his unmistakably unique world of sound. Scott Paulin

All Music Guide

Rock-musician-turned-film-composer Danny Elfman was commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra to write Serenada Schizophrana, his first piece of classical concert music, and it had its world premiere at Carnegie Hall on February 23, 2005. This recording, produced by Elfman and conducted by John Mauceri, has been made with all the ambition of a big-budget Hollywood film, employing an orchestra of 140 members plus a small choir. In his liner notes, Elfman cites a series of influences, but the two a listener is most likely to be reminded of are Bernard Herrmann and the man Elfman calls "one of my few living influences," Philip Glass. This is because, as is usual in his many film scores, Elfman pay particular attention to radically changing dynamics (Herrmann) and quick, driving tempos (Glass). But the biggest influence on Elfman, as demonstrated here, may not so much be an earlier composer as his day job. He writes that he began composing the work by writing short pieces of "maybe a minute each," developed some of them until he had six separate movements, and then "more or less let the movements take themselves wherever they wanted to go in a kind of musical stream of consciousness...." This turns out to be a reasonable description of the musical results, and another way of putting it would be to say that Elfman as a film composer, particularly of the adventure and fantasy films on which he often works, is accustomed to writing short cues to underline specific dramatic moments onscreen and that, even without that inspiration, he has done much the same thing here. One might have hoped that he would take the opportunity to develop his musical ideas more rather than just stringing a lot of them together and juxtaposing them in ways that sound interesting, but given his experiences of the past 20 years, that might have been too much to expect. As it is, Serenada Schizophrana lives up to its name, and it is not surprising to note that, although not written for the movies, it has already been adapted to them, serving as soundtrack to the IMAX film Deep Sea 3D. William Ruhlmann

Newark Star-Ledger

This spectacularly vivid recording needs no images.... It all ends up sounding very much like Elfman, irresistibly so. Bradley Bambarger