Twenty years after his famous debut at Carnegie Hall firmly established him in the United States, Jascha Heifetz moved his home from Connecticut to Beverly Hills, California. Not long after that, in June 1938, he had his first experience starring in a Hollywood film, Samuel Goldwyn's They Shall Have Music. Though Heifetz's uncompromising standards and the movie business were irreconcilable, the combination of Heifetz and Hollywood proved productive, eventually resulting in a happy collaboration between the violinist and a number of composers working for the studios. The works heard here are the fruit of such collaborations. In the days of silent films a pianist usually played excerpts from his repertoire to accompany the action on the screen. When the great movie houses of the '20s employed a symphony orchestra for the same purpose, arrangements of existing scores were prepared or new music was written. With the advent of sound movies major composers such as Sergei Prokofiev and William Walton were persuaded to write film scores. In the late '30s many others, forced out of Europe, found haven and employment in Hollywood, among them Erich Wolfgang Komgold. In 1934 Korngold came to Hollywood with the Austrian director Max Reinhardt to arrange Mendelssohn's music for a film of A Midsummer Night's Dream. As a result of the Anschluss (1938) Vienna was closed to him, and he settled in Hollywood. He wrote virtually nothing but film scores during the war years. In 1945, however, encouraged by Heifetz, Korngold completed a violin concerto he had been persuaded to undertake in 1937 by another great violinist, Bronislaw Huberman. Though ultimately written for Heifetz, the work is dedicated to Gustav Mahler's widow, Alma, whom Korngold knew through his teacher, composer Alexander Zemlinsky. Heifetz gave the premiere of the concerto with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra under Vladimir Golschmann on February 15,1947. It is a work in which the soloist dominates. Although the principal themes are drawn from material Korngold had composed for the films Another Dawn, Juarez, Anthony Adverse and The Prince and the Pauper, its three movements comprise a full-blooded concerto in the composer's late Romantic melodic style, a style to which Heifetz was especially responsive. As Korngold's models—Mahler and Richard Strauss—reflect his Austro-Hungarian background, so too does Hungarian-born Miklós Rózsa show the unmistakable influence of his compatriots Bartók and Kodâly. Though he did not actually study with either, he took violin lessons in his native Budapest and retained a strong identification with the folk style of his native country. Summers at his father's estate in northern Hungary gave him an opportunity to absorb the folk idiom that suffuses his music. Rózsa began his film-score career in 1937, writing music for movies produced by Alexander Korda. After World War II began Rózsa followed Korda to Hollywood, where he scored many notable films. Unlike Korngold, he rarely used material from his films in his concert music; however, he did use a theme from the violin concerto in one of his later movies. In 1953, after seeing sketches for a violin concerto, Heifetz encouraged Rózsa to continue with the work; Rózsa completed it in six weeks, but it was 18 months before Heifetz was satisfied with the result of their collaboration. Heifetz played the premiere with Walter Hendl and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra on January 15,1956. In 1961 Heifetz and Piatigorsky asked Rózsa to write a work for them. The second movement of the resulting Sinfonia concertante is the Tema con variazioni; it was first performed at the Heifetz-Piatigorsky Concerts in Los Angeles on September 29, 1963. The theme is an extensive Hungarian folklike melody, introduced by the cello and then taken through seven rhythmically, harmonically and melodically diverse variations. A cadenza for the two soloists in the fourth, the savage mood of the fifth and the atmospheric, impassioned character of the final variation are some of the notable features of this piece. Franz Waxman was another émigré composer living in Hollywood and writing film scores as well as concert music. One of the several paraphrases of melodies from Carmen is by Sarasate. Though Waxman used some of Sarasate's elements in his own "Carmen" Fantasy—written for the film Humoresque and then revised for Heifetz—an imaginative orchestration helps turn it into an entirely different piece. Enhancing the considerable difficulties of Sarasate's version with technical feats of his own—tailor-made for Heifetz—Waxman also emphasizes the gypsy character of the work by linking its sections with brilliant cadenzas having scales in thirds, sixths and fingered octaves. —Gabriel Banat