Classics remastered

The Disney films Pinocchio and Fantasia turn 75 this year. And to mark the occasion, Walt Disney Records has rereleased the soundtracks of both in freshly remastered, multi-disc packages.

Discs One and Two of The Legacy Collection: Fantasia Original Motion Picture Soundtrack contain Fantasia’s original eight Leopold Stokowski–conducted selections plus Debussy’s “Claire de Lune” and Sterling Holloway narrating “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Discs Three and Four contain the soundtrack’s 1982 digital rerecording by a 121-piece orchestra under the direction of Irwin Kostal plus Holloway narrating “Peter and the Wolf.”

Disc One of The Legacy Collection: Pinocchio Original Motion Picture Soundtrack contains Pinocchio’s original 25 songs, Disc Two new recordings of songs that ended up on the cutting-room floor and post-Pinocchio Jiminy Cricket songs sung by Cliff Edwards.

That both soundtracks have turned 75 is a sobering reminder that the films they accompanied premiered not in a vacuum but against the backdrop of World War II and were thus initially experienced as a combination of escapism and emotional solace during a particularly grim and trying time. Only in subsequent peacetime decades did they take on their idyllic-childhood redolence.

Nowadays, anything idyllic risks being looked at askance and subjected by revisionists to anachronistic, politically correct schemata. By such standards Pinocchio will be found wanting. It would take an uncommonly imaginative postmodernist, after all, to consider a living marionette, a conscientious cricket, or a blue-haired fairy as a subversive metaphor. “Give a Little Whistle” even takes its injunction to “take the straight and narrow path” from the Bible while the instrumentals “Monstro Awakes” and “Whale Chase” could stir up memories of Jonah.

But by at least by one politically correct standard—“diversity”—Fantasia acquits itself well.

For Protestant Christians, there’s Bach’s program-opening “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor”; for Catholic Christians, Schubert’s program-closing “Ave Maria”; and for the Eastern Orthodox Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Then there are The Nutcracker Suite, composed by a homosexual (Tchaikovsky), and “A Night on Bald Mountain,” composed by an alcoholic (Mussorgsky).

Lowbrows, meanwhile, get to discover the melody of Allan Sherman’s “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” in Ponchielli’s “Dance of the Hours.” And “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” based on a Goethe poem about wizardry gone awry and set to music by Paul Dukas, guarantees Germans, Frenchmen, and maybe even occultists a seat at the table. Of contemporary society’s primary special-interest groups, only Muslims and African-Americans get the cold shoulder.

Of course, to reduce Fantasia’s rich sampling of Western musical accomplishment to such a series of checked-off tick boxes is silly. But these are silly times. To the extent that these two Legacy Collections can be said to hold a mirror up to them, they’re doing the world quite a favor.

Magic and majesty

Fantasias & Fugues: Music for Harp (MSR), the new album by the Canadian harpist Katrina Szederkényi, reminds the world that the word fantasia has a meaning preceding Disney. “The fantasia calls on the musician to express his personal artistry,” writes Alexander Rider in the liner notes, “the magic and majesty of his vision ... it is the inner life articulated.”

Judging by her taste in composers and her skill at burnishing the magic and the majesty of their compositions, Szederkényi must have a particularly rich inner life. One need only compare her touch on Joaquín Turina’s Tocata y Fuga—Ciclo Pianístico I, Op. 50, to the recordings of Spanish composers by the late-great Nicanor Zabaleta to hear how faithfully she’s extending her instrument’s noble tradition. —A.O.