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I'm hoping for a little brainstorming help. As many of you know, I manage the Gift Shop at the Santa Fe Opera and I do the music buying for the store. I have long wanted to do a film music section here and tie it in by talking about Erich Wolfgang Korngold, who of course wrote both opera and film music and called his film scores his "operas without words". For various reasons this never came about, but there's a brand new shop now, with more space, and it looks like I finally have the go-ahead.
The problem is that it has to be a section with composers who wrote *both* operas and film music. So a lot of greats I would have featured before, like Alfred Newman and Miklos Rozsa, are now disqualified from inclusion no matter what crossover appeal they might have with a general classical crowd.
The other likely restriction is that it will have to be composers with both an example of their film music and an example of their opera in print and available. So that rules out even great composers who have written (commercially unrecorded) opera like Howard Shore, Elliot Goldenthal...even Bernard Herrmann sadly because I can't find a distributor for his opera Wuthering Heights (I know it's on Amazon but we have to be able to get it at a wholesale price). My boss wants me to do Tan Dun but all of his operas are out of print.
These are the ones I've come up with and I'm hoping that some of you have some ideas I haven't thought of yet:
1. Camille Saint-Saens (definitely want to feature him since he was the first high profile composer to write a film score)
2. Erich Wolfgang Korngold (duh)
3. Sergei Prokofiev (probably Alexander Nevsky and his opera War and Peace)
4. Dmitri Shostakovich (probably Hamlet on Naxos and maybe Lady Macbeth for the opera)
5. Nino Rota (one of his pretty-good operas is in print and I'd probably do the Silva Romeo & Juliet for the film score)
6. Philip Glass (my boss is a huge fan and he's sort of the excuse for doing this)
7. Rachel Portman (her opera The Little Prince and probably Never Let Me Go, IMO her greatest work)
Don Davis is a maybe; his Spanish-language opera Rio de Sangre has been recorded, but I don't know if he has enough name recognition and the film score I'd want to feature would be The Matrix Revolutions, a second sequel so a little awkward. Of course Leonard Bernstein is a big name and I would love to bring in Intrada's recent On the Waterfront release, but it might be a little bit of a stretch to call Candide or West Side Story operas (though I'm tempted to make the case anyway). What other talented composers can you guys think of that would qualify?
Yavar
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Hi, Yavar.
My first thought is of Richard Rodney Bennett.
"The Mines Of Sulphur" has been on Chandos for a while.
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Andre Previn:
There are recordings of his "Brief Encounter" and "Streetcar Named Desire," and maybe others.
George Antheil:
Several operas, including "Volpone," though I don't know about current availability.
Rachel Portman:
Wrote an opera based on "The Little Prince," by Antoine de St. Exupery.
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I thought there was a recording of Corigliano's "The Ghosts of Versailles", but I was mistaken. Perhaps they'll record the current LA Opera production.
In the case of Bernstein, I would argue that "Candide" could be considered an operetta (particularly in the Bernstein conducted edition, which has the greatest amount of musical material, and the score really does the bulk of the storytelling), but there is his one act chamber opera "Trouble in Tahiti" which is readily available on CD, and I highly recommend it. Its sibling show/quasi-sequel, the full-length opera "A Quiet Place", was available for a while, but I think it might be out of print now? Something to look into, anyway.
Peter Schickele (Silent Running) wrote a few miniature operas as "P.D.Q. Bach", including "The Stoned Guest" and "Hansel & Gretel & Ted & Alice" (as well as the full length "The Abduction of Figaro," which is only available on home video/DVD).
Richard Rodney Bennett's brilliant "The Mines of Sulphur" is in print and available on CD.
Oh, there's also Sir William Walton's "Troilus and Cressida".
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Arthur Honegger
Phillip Glass
Leonard Bernstein
Aaron Copland
Virgil Thomson
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Gustave Holst
If I think of more, will post.
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Alfred Schnittke
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Great suggestions, guys! Much appreciated (and keep 'em comin' if you think of more). Also, this thread can grown beyond my little project if people feel like discussing operas by film composers or film scores by opera composers. 
Yavar
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Well, kind of Ennio Morricone.
I understood he had tackled two separate opera projects.
One i was told was shelved before completion and i cant recall if the second was completed but not so far performed.
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All I can contribute is disappointing news:
John Corigliano did "Ghosts of Versailles", which never made it cd, I'm finding.
Ravel (with 2 operas in print) did some score for a Don Quixote film (1933), but did not complete it for the film (published as 3 songs later).
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Krzysztof Penderecki - not sure what is in print, though.
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Perhaps Erik Satie -- wrote music for a film by Rene Clair -- and also composed Socrates -- but I'm not sure if that is considered an opera by experts.
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Georges Auric apparently wrote an opera, Sous le masque, but I haven't found a recording yet.
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I know that opera companies perform West Side Story on the regular, so I doubt that would be an issue. The Deutsch e Gramaphone recording even comes coupled with his On the Waterfront suite.
I know Goldenthal's Grendel still hasn't received a recording, but I wonder if you could skirt by with Fire Water Paper: a Vietnam Oratorio (or for that matter, with Herrmann's Moby Dick).
Lastly - has anybody brought up Michael Nyman? Surely there's plenty of cross-over appeal there - maybe Facing Goya paired with The Piano Concerto, or one of the Peter Greenway compilations.
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Sir Peter Maxwell Davies
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I just hit a jackpot!
It turns out the *only* Santa Fe Opera recording that exists legally is an opera by Virgil Thompson!
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0000030CZ/sr=1-1/qid=1434750000/
I had been told the Santa Fe Opera *never* recorded but I recently found out that is not true and this is the one exception. It would be awesome to get this in as well as his two most well known film scores on Naxos!
Yavar
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British composers Benjamin Britten (duh!), Elisabeth Lutyens, Lennox Berkeley, Clifton Parker, Arthur Bax, Arthur Bliss.
German composer Hans Werner Henze.
Spanish composer Roberto Gerhard.
American Richard Einhorn.
Since some of Sondheim's shows are performed by opera companies (Sweeney Todd for example), and since he's done a little film work, he sort of qualifies.
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