Recent Purchases: Scores - Part I

Today my copy of Blown Away (Silvestri) arrived. I'm looking forward to playing it very very loudy (seeing as I also received a letter that seriously pissed me off). Come on Alan, let's do this!

Bit of a haul over the last few weeks:

* Bandolero - Jerry Goldsmith. A classic. Long overdue in my collection
* The List Of Adrian Messenger - Jerry Goldsmith. Timmer says it's good. He better be right...
* The Adventurer (The Curse Of The Midas Box) - Fernando Velázquez. Loved the samples!
* Knights Of Badassdom - Bear McCreary. Absolutely awful, asinine title, but what a score! Uillean pipes, electric guitars and huge themes abound!
* The Warriors - Barry DeVorzon. Apparently an eighties' electronics pioneer? I appear to like these more than I used to think, so let's see...
* À Vous De Jouer, Milord - François de Roubaix. Again: the samples over at musicboxrecords.com sounded fantastic.
* Hold-up / Dernier Été À Tanger - Serge Franklin. You know, the French Music Box Records (together with Spanish Quartet Records, Russian KeepMoving Records and Canadian Disques Cinemusiques) are becoming my favourite haven of The Great and Undiscovered in soundtracks!
* The Pit And The Pendulum - Richard Band. His most lavish horror score to date. Love it!
* The AVA Collection - Elmer Bernstein. Collection of six albums, all previously released, but containing two of my all time favourites (Walk On The Wild Side and Movie And TV themes), from pristine sources rather than vinyl copies!

Got me some listening to do!

RoboCop - Basil Poledouris (Intrada)
A new copy with a reasonable prise tag compared to what prises I see this album is offered for.

The Portrait of a Lady - Wojciech Kilar
A used copy in mint condition.

Volker

My list of scores received in the mail over the past week:

- A Time of Destiny - Ennio Morricone (Quartet Records)
- The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of Unicorn - John Williams
- Godzilla - David Arnold (BSX)
- Godzilla - Alexandre Desplat
- Rush - Hans Zimmer

I once bought the expanded edition of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and found that I prefer the album edit. Brilliant as it is, there is too much repitition and variation of the same. So, I'II pass on that ^ one.

Volker

What a fine haul.

The Cotton Club is a great album ( you do know it's jazz don't you Captain? ), a shame there's only two score tracks from John Barry.

I can talk about that album forever. It's the one that made me interested in electronic music, Jean Michel Jarre and ultimately film music, in many ways. a HUGE cornerstone in my music listening history.

And you better like it!

So I did. It's a brand new recording though, are you aware of that?

Someone stated that he thought the chorus on the Prometheus Recording was somewhat off. (Whatever that means.) I have no problem with the performance of the Prometheus chorus.

The overall sound quality of the Intrada release is much better. That does not come as a surprise, given that the Prometheus recording was made about 30 years ago.

Apart from that both recordings are different. Just as no two recordings of Beethoven's Ninth sound exactely the same. These twelve pieces are so great that it is nice to have two distinct recordings of them.

I big bonus on the Intrada album is a concert piece, a scoring of Psalm 23.

I'd very much like to learn your opinion about the Intrada release.

Volker

On the back of the "Complete Original Score" release of For A Few Dollars More, the same treatment has been done for The Good, The Bad and The Ugly:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ennio-Morricone … mp;sr=1-95

As with the previous score, it's released on the Recording Arts label and is an attempt to recreate the complete original score as heard in the film. Some of it works very well and some not so. Both "The Ecstasy of Gold" and "The Trio" tracks do lack a certain amount of presence compared with the originals, but there are some nice little touches included - e.g., the solo percussion of the final sequence when Eastwood is riding off from Wallach. From start to finish the score runs to just over 75 minutes and a few alternates pad out the release to a generous 95 minutes worth of music.

On balance I'd say that it's worth a listen - and that's coming from someone who usually steers clear of non-OST versions of scores!

And now - for completeness' sake - Recording Arts have just released their third album featuring "extended and complete" versions of Morricone's Dollars trilogy.

This final album is a re-recording of the first film, A Fistful of Dollars:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ennio-Morricone … mp;sr=1-81

As with the previous two releases, there's parts where they succeed and other areas where they don't do so well at re-creating Morricone's original. The titles is done reasonably well, and there are several highlights throughout the album - particularly when it comes to making previously unreleased material available. But the relatively poor quality of the strings, woodwind and brass samples lets the listening experience down (sometimes quite badly). And for these aspects of the re-recording of a Morricone Spaghetti Western score to be sub-par is a major drawback.

Perhaps the weakest of the 3 releases, it's perhaps worth it to finish the set and to support an admirable project.

Those CDs found their way into my collection today:

Son of Batman (2014) - Frederik Wiedmann
Field of Lost Shoes (2014)- Frederik Wiedmann
The Beyondness of Things (1998) - John Barry

I hope to comment on them in the course of the weekend.

Volker

You sure also own Eternal Echoes. What do you think?

Whoah! A great many orders came in all at once!

* Predator 2 - Alan Silverstri
I caved when I heard the sound quality was much better than the original release
* The Wild Side - Elmer Bernstein
A rerecording with the big band of the canaries of some of Bernstein's jazz themes. Greattttt!!!
* The Adventurers - Antonio Carlos Jobim, arranged by Quincy Jones, played by the Ray Brown Orchestra. Yeah, we remain steadfast in jazz mode!
* Fringe - Michael Giacchino (& Chris Tilton & Chad Seiter)
Great show, pretty darn good early Giacchino score!
* Alias - Michael Giacchino
So-so show, but some of the finest work Giacchino ever did! Exceiting, precussive and creative!
* A Prayer For The Dying - Bill Conti
Conti is very hit or miss with me, but I REALLY liked the sound clip previews: Irish goings-on with bodhrans and fiddles, begorrah to be sure!
* Sahara - Ennio Morricone
Thematic, non-avant garde Morricone. Like.
* The Pink Panther Strikes Again - Henry Mancini
My favourite Pink Panther movie. So yeah, I'm buying this mostly for nostalgic reasons. It's not the best Mancini ever did for the series...but it's still pretty damn good!
* Shaft - David Arnold
One word: FINALLY!!!!!!
* One The Waterfront - Leonard Bernstein
Some one word as above. Bloody iconic!
* Les Onze Mille Verges - Michel Colombier
I think it was Thor who sung the praises of this? Anyway, bit of a gamble.

And then there's a SLEW of CDs came in from Kronos, as I greedily went through their sales page.
Almost none of these films or scores I ever even heard of before, but the clips were most promising!
* Welcome To The Jungle - Karl Preusser [Jean-Claude van Damme in a reality show going badly wrong]
* My Nikifor - Bartek Gliniak [biopic of a strange, recluse Polish painter]
* The Little Wizard - Marc Timón Barceló [an animation film. I liked Barceló's Pompei a lot!]
* The Ungodly - Carles Cases [some of his great work for Lovecraft-inspired films]
* Four Assassins - Andre Matthias [no idea, but the sound clips were great!]
* Africa To-day - Piero Umiliani [an old documentary, with some great funky and folk work]
* Lethe/Days Like Years - Christoph Zirngibl [everything about this CD oozes melancholy. So naturally I want it.]
* The Light Thief - Andre Matthias [I KNOW Thor was enthusiastic about THIS one. And I find when our tastes match, they REALLY match!]
* Anita - Marco Werba [no clue, but once again I really liked the clips]

Kronos' Godwin was even kind enough to throw in a bonus CD: Giallo - Marco Werba. What a lovely gesture! (I have to say that from our communications, Godwin comes across as one of the nicest guys in the soundtrack community. That makes ordering at Kronos always a pleasure.)

So, yeah, too bad I don't have proper holidays (I do have the Christmas days off, of course!), as I got me some listening to do!

When I listened to that score today I thought that some of the action cues have a nice touch of avant-garde.

Volker