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Arthur Honegger is great.
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In the time of Steiner, Korngold, Waxman etc. Any other composers and albums during that you can recommend? I'm not familiar with. Georges Auric I'd assume.
Edit: even before Rosza and Tiomkin if that's possible.
It’s “Rozsa”...and it’s possible to pre-date him and Tiomkin, of course, but they are pretty much the same time as Steiner, Korngold, and Waxman, all starting Hollywood work in the 30s. Alfred Newman was (like Steiner) working in Hollywood earlier in the 30s than Korngold and Waxman (whose earliest original scores for Hollywood were both in 1935). I guess if you include original scores outside of Hollywood Waxman beat Korngold to film music, starting half a decade earlier, in 1930. Tiomkin really started around the same time, writing original music for *filmed* ballets even in the late 1920s (Intrada just released an album of new recordings of these a few months ago).
So if you really want before Rozsa (first film score in 1937, though he wrote some great concert music before that) *and* Tiomkin, you also have to go before (not “in the time of”) Steiner, Korngold, Waxman, and Newman, i.e. the silent era!
So what came before all of them? A wealth of stuff! If you count the Tiomkin scores for filmed ballets, then even Shostakovich doesn’t quite qualify, writing his first original film score around the same time as Tiomkin’s earliest in the late 20s. But I do echo the recommendation of the Naxos recordings of early Shostakovich scores; they’re great! I think Mark Fitz-Gerald has conducted five of them so far at this point? Excellent stuff, with my favorite being Odna (Alone), which sits right on the cusp of sound films. You should absolutely thinking of Shostakovich as a film composer, by the way. While Prokofiev wrote fewer film scores than Korngold, Shostakovich wrote more than twice as many as Korngold! And many of them are very, very good.
But there’s some great pre-Shostakovich film scoring as well. Gottfried Huppertz might be the biggest name I can think of who actually specialized in original orchestral film music — seek out his fantastic mid-20s scores for Metropolis and Die Niebelungen, first! And another favorite of mine is Salammbo by one of my favorite French composers of the 20th century, Florent Schmitt. His only film score I’m fairly certain but it’s excellent. Here’s an excellent Doug Adams (author of The Music of the Lord of the Rings Films) piece about the score!
https://www.google.com/amp/s/florentschmitt.com/2014/06/12/film-music-specialist-doug-adams-talks-about-florent-schmitts-salammbo-and-other-music-scores-from-the-silent-film-era/amp/
But if you REALLY want to go back to the beginning of original film music, one must look to another Frenchman (in fact my favorite French composer of all time): Camille Saint-Saens and his original score to The Assassination of the Duke of Guise back in 1908!
Here’s the recording of it that I have:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00004TVGT/
And here’s a review of it from Movie Music UK:
https://moviemusicuk.us/2019/05/13/lassassinat-du-duc-de-guise-camille-saint-saens/amp/
Yavar
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Oooh I love Saint-Saens...the Bacchanale and Danse Macabre are temped for a lot of films.
Speaking of classical, Shostakovich's King Lear is very powerful.
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