Composer and conductor Dimitri Tiomkin, born in Russia in 1894, but who emigrated to the USA after the First World War, is one of the most successful and celebrated composers of film music in the history of cinema. Nominated for 22 Academy Awards, he won four of them, for Best Original Score for “High Noon”, “The High And The Mighty” and “The Old Man And The Sea” and for Best Original Song for “High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me”. In the process of writing songs and themes for dozens of movies, he had more than 25 chart entries with his compositions when recorded as singles by other artists. This great-value 55-track 2-CD set comprises themes and music from original soundtrack compositions, along with recordings of his movie songs and music by other artists from the first and highly significant first quarter-century of his career. It includes music from all the films for which he won Academy Awards, and a significant proportion of those for which he was nominated. It also features 27 records which made either US or UK charts, including Top 5 hits with Frankie Laine’s “High Noon” and “Blowing Wild”, Les Baxter’s “The High And The Mighty”, and Pat Boone’s “Friendly Persuasion”, as well recordings by many major artists like Nat King Cole, Johnny Mathis, Dean Martin and Gene Pitney. It offers a substantial and varied insight into the work of one of the legendary, but sometime unheralded, figures in the world of movie music via some compositions which are veritable masterpieces of their kind.
