Right from the beginning music accompanied the moving image, whether the badly-tuned piano of legend, or a full orchestra at a prestige theatre. However, the music was often complied from various classical sources, and where original scores were penned, usually they have been lost. This is where Carl (Pride and Prejudice, 1995) Davis, came in, for when Channel 4 and Photoplay restored a series of "silent" classics, Davis wrote the essential new scores.Several albums of his "silent" music have been released, including The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Napoleon (1927), but this double-anthology presents 138 minutes from 16 Davis "silents", adding a bonus of Charlie Chaplin's overture from City Lights (1931). The style is deliberately old-fashioned, a lush pseudo-classical sound owning much to the light music tradition, famous classical tunes sometimes woven into the musical tapestries, as when Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream appears in The Wedding March (1928). Elsewhere Davis makes The Thief of Bagdad (1924) and Ben-Hur (1925) his own, skilfully evading direct comparison with Miklós Rózsa's great scores for the remakes. While The Silents at times sound kitsch, this is what going to "the flicks" used to sound like, so surrender and wallow in a sumptuous cinematic history lesson.--Gary S. Dalkin
