Under Jerry Goldsmith's baton, Alex North's soundtrack for Carol Reed's 1965 film about the life and artistic conflicts of Michelangelo gets a second wind. North's epic sweep and his mixture of Renaissance musical forms, somber religious chords, plainsong melody, and march beats congeal into a symphonic grandeur faithful to the film's equally larger-than-life subject matter--inspiration's heavenly ...
As Hollywood's only true expert in Mexican music, Alex North was the only credible choice to score Elia Kazan's Viva Zapata! (1952). North absorbed the country's musical culture in 1939, when he worked as a member of the Anna Sokolow dance company and as a student of Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940). Zapata! shimmers with invention, though always in ways tied closely to ...