Jerry Goldsmith: 40 Years of Film Music Soundtrack CD

Jerry Goldsmith: 40 Years of Film Music Soundtrack songs A rare pairing of A-list Hollywood composers, The Last of the Mohicans teams Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman, who replaced the former midway through production. The resulting score suffers from the schizophrenia one would expect given its abrupt creative shift, but proves greater than the sum of its parts thanks to a series of impressively epic orchestral themes. Jones' opening main theme is the most effective music here, capturing the mystery and primal wonder of James Fennimore Cooper's frontier milieu in ravishing detail. While he wisely relegates synthesizers to the background, Edelman vaults his electronics front and center, and his glossy modern sensibilities are a poor fit with the subject matter. Last of the Mohicans nevertheless proved a bestseller, buoyed largely by the inclusion of Clannad's mystical love theme "I Will Find You," although some listeners will find its new age feel-goodery a little much to swallow. ~ Jason Ankeny Live Recording Engineers include: John Richards John Whynot, ...

Jerry Goldsmith: 40 Years of Film Music Soundtrack buy CD music The death of film composer Elmer Bernstein in 2004 made him an obvious choice for Silva Screen Records' "Essential" composer series (Gone with the Wind: The Essential Max Steiner Film Music Collection, The Essential Nino Rota Film Music Collection, etc.). Silva Screen is dedicated to creating new recordings (sometimes the first ever) of film music, generally performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra (which doubtless works cheaper than a major orchestra in the unionized West would), and it has had occasion to apply itself to Bernstein before, sometimes with his active cooperation. In fact, of the 26 tracks included here, 15 have been released previously on such albums as The Crimson Pirate: Swashbucklers of the Silver Screen and Jazz in Film (performed by the National Youth Jazz Orchestra). The compilers and producers, primarily James Fitzpatrick, have chosen from among Bernstein's 150-plus scores with an eye toward the composer's versatility as well as his best-known work. He was typecast in Hollywood, but fortunately, with such a long and prolific career, he managed to be typecast several times for different things. Early on, The Man with the Golden Arm marked him as a "jazz" composer, and he got similar assignments, which he treated similarly (a good example being Walk on the Wild Side). Then, with the success of The Magnificent Seven and its memorable, appropriately magnificent theme (the leadoff track here), he became known as a composer for Westerns, and there is a noticeable similarity in his work on such successors as The Comancheros, True Grit, The Sons of Katie Elder, and The Shootist, even though the compilers have deliberately spread them out through the album. Later in his career, Bernstein's delightfully parodic score for Airplane! (with a suite given a premiere recording on this collection) suddenly made him the man to see for comedies, though listeners get relatively little of that work here. The compilers have gone out of their way to find scoring that falls outside of these three main threads in Bernstein's work, including horror (a premiere recording of "Metamorphosis" from An American Werewolf in London), period romance (The Age of Innocence), and musical comedy (Thoroughly Modern Millie, another premiere recording of the cue "Sky-Hi"), along with more exotic efforts such as Zulu Dawn and Hawaii. Perhaps Bernstein's greatest scores (though also atypical) get the longest excerpts: a haunting eight-plus-minute suite from To Kill a Mockingbird and a stirring eight minutes of the overture from The Ten Commandments at the end. The result may not be all of the essential Bernstein on two CDs in 110 minutes, but it is a good sampler of a lengthy and varied career. ~ William Ruhlmann Audio Mixer: Gareth Williams. Liner Note Author: James Fitzpatrick. Recording information: Barrandov Studios, Smecky Soundstage, Prague, Czech Rep; Whitfield Street Studios, London, England. Photographer: James Fitzpatrick. Arrangers: Bob Dowell; Elmer Bernstein ; John Bell ; Emilie A. Bernstein; David Spear; Leo Shuken; Patrick Russ; Geoff Castle; Jack Hayes; John Langley; Nic Raine; Christopher Palmer.

Jerry Goldsmith: 40 Years of Film Music Soundtrack album for sale Reynold da Silva's Silva Screen Records (of which Prime Time is an imprint) has devoted itself to new recordings of film music (usually, as here, performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra), and its box set The Music of John Williams: 40 Years of Film Music, filling four CDs and running over three hours and 45 minutes, is one of its most ambitious efforts. That's appropriate for Williams, both because he is the most successful film composer of the 40-year period beginning in the early '60s and because his music is produced on such a large scale. Since the '70s, Williams has been associated with directors Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, and he has matched their blockbuster films with his large-scale scores, producing some of the most memorable themes of the era, including instantly recognizable music from Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones series. Spielberg and Lucas have often attempted to evoke the styles of the old serials of the '40s, such as Flash Gordon, but on an epic scale, and Williams has done much the same thing with his music, which owes little or nothing to the more jazz- and rock-influenced film composers of the '50s and '60s, and everything to the film composers of an earlier generation, such as Franz Waxman and Victor Young, with its sweeping orchestral statements, martial rhythms, and grandly ornamented melodies. Yet, like the directors, Williams does it all with a slight wink to the audience. This collection doesn't restrict itself to Williams' best-known work, but it does demonstrate that even in his lesser-known pieces, his style is often much the same. The overture from The Cowboys, for example, while employing some standard Western elements familiar from Hollywood movies of decades before, also has a hint of Star Wars. Even when he is scoring a more downbeat film like Born on the Fourth of July, Williams can't seem to help writing his usual uplifting music. Despite its length, this collection can't do more than offer excerpts of Williams' extensive work, but the sampling is representative, and the best of the composer's familiar themes is included. ~ William Ruhlmann

Jerry Goldsmith: 40 Years of Film Music Soundtrack CD music GOLDSMITH CONDUCTS GOLDSMITH includes themes from THE BLUE MAX, DOCTOR KILDARE, THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., THE WALTONS, MASADA, GREMLINS, THE SAND PEBBLES, CHINATOWN, POLTERGEIST, PAPILLON, THE WIND AND THE LION, PATTON and LEGEND. All tracks have been digitally remastered in Dolby Surround and HDCD by Gareth Williams (SRT, Cambridge). Film composer Jerry Goldsmith conducted Britain's Philharmonia Orchestra in a concert of his music at the Barbican Centre in London on March 10, 1987, and on the following day went into a studio and recorded a version of the show with them. It is an interesting redaction of the work of this prolific writer which seems designed to defeat some of the critical notions about him. Basically, the rap on Goldsmith is that, emerging in the dying days of the studio system, he was a composer of highly functional music who swept away the influences of European classical music from Hollywood in favor of a versatile, eclectic approach to scoring that served the images without calling attention to itself and without having the stamp of an individual voice. As such, Goldsmith wouldn't seem like the kind of composer who would have an evening of music devoted to him, unless there was a big screen hanging over the stage. But from the beginning, this album contradicts such an idea, and it's probably no accident that it does so by starting with a five-part suite from The Blue Max, an uncharacteristically ambitious score that was drastically cut in the finished film. Elsewhere, there are suites of television themes and movie themes that are nearly unrecognizable from their sources and a few other major efforts, notably the TV miniseries Masada and "The Generals Suite" drawn from MacArthur and Patton. This is a highly selective assembly that, for example, ignores Goldsmith's sole Oscarâ winner, The Omen, but it makes the point that, somewhere in his vast catalog, there are powerful individual statements not entirely enslaved to film images. ~ William Ruhlmann W/Philharmonia Orch.Themes Fr: Chinatown,Poltergeist,Legend + /Philharmonia Orchestra. Recorded at Walthamstow Assembly Hall on March 11, 1987. Audio Mixer: Mike Ross-Trevor. Recording information: CBS Studios; Walthamstow Town Hall, London, England. Arrangers: Mort Stevens; Stanley Black.