Dimitri Tiomkin - The Green Leaves Of Summer

This is the original version of "The Green Leaves Of Summer," from the soundtrack of the film The Alamo. I'd heard the song for years before I noticed that there was something vaguely Russian about the melody, which seemed so weird for a song from a movie about Texas and Mexico that I chalked the perception up to some mild brain malfunction on my part. But it's true, and for a simple reason: Dimitri Tiomkin was born and raised in Russia. Tiomkin was part of the group of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood composers (including Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Bernard Herrmann) who left Europe to escape the Nazis and World War Two. As with all of us, his youth never really left him.

This version seems to put some people off, since it sounds rather old-fashioned. But I'm a sucker for a capella choral groups, and the blend of the many voices, from soprano to deep bass, always gets me.