YOUR ALL TIME FAVOURITE FILM SCORE ALBUMS!!!

The Muppet Movie!???......

















( no need for embarrassment there! )

I could watch The Wizard of Oz over and over, we're a right pair of closet Dorothy's you and I

We are talking about album presentations not just best score.

BTW, it seems you have only heard the shitty RCA Special Edition of Return of the Jedi. If you ever listen to the original LP presentation or the 1993 Arista box set version of the score (which, IMO, is the superior presentation) then you will know that the score sounds ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT!

-Erik-

3. LADIES IN LAVENDER - Nigel Hess

This is just a outrageously beautiful album. The themes are so gorgeous, the solo violin, courtesy of Joshua Bell, is so good in this score. And while Nigel Hess's music only lasts 32 minutes, there's not a superfluous minute in there, and the album is padded with newly recorded pieces of romantic classics. Joshua Bell on Massanet's Meditation is particularly wonderful. It is the best recording of that piece I've ever heard. All around, this is a spectacular album, full of exactly the kind of music I love best.

Now THERE's an unexpected entry!
Never heard of this until now...I should probably check it out some time.
Cheers christopher!

I have made up my mind about my top ten and I will now start to write them out one by one to have them at the ready when Timmer opens up another slot.

Volker

Yeah, I figured that one would be weird for some people, but it won't be the last odd choice in my list. Because I value beauty way over bombast, I'm sure there will be quite a few scores in my list that no one else would put that high. I stand by this choice entirely, though. It's a GORGEOUS score.

Top 10 is fairly easy, since it isn't long since I made a list (I had to do it for my first episode of Celluloid Tunes). Beyond that, things get trickier.

Ok, time to play this game. This one's going to be a bit off the beaten track for some, but those who know it will understand.

PORTRAIT OF A LADY (Wojciech Kilar)

Back in the days when I went to CD stores, and browsed soundtrack albums, if I couldn't find something to buy that I was familiar with, I took a gamble. And this was one of them. I had seen the film and thought it a bit of a waste of time. (Opinion since revised, I must report.) I had pretty much no memory of the music except for the Schubert. But despite being a bit snobby about The Piano (thinking it a film score for a certain class of people who only like safe pretty music for safe pretty films), I think I must have known at heart that this director allowed music have a pretty special character in her films.

Anyway, what a bet! Kilar can often draw ire -- even reportedly from Francis Ford Coppola -- for being able to write great themes but essentially just re-presenting them from there. I'm not sure this score would make a case against that. (Maybe The Ninth Gate?) But what themes! What a voice! If this is minimalism, it never got more romantic than this. This stuff breathes heavily beneath its corset, exuding the kind of passion few scores touch. (Even Youth without Youth, the most recent score to touch similar feelings, tempered it with such regret.) Barry's often made us swoon in similar ways, but there's an authority to Kilar's writing, drawing equally on 19th century romanticism and minimalism, that just feels like -- "Sit back everyone. The Master's come to town."

Themes are trotted out in every track as though they grew on trees. 'Prologue: My Life Before Me' is beguiles right out of the gate, led by a doubling of recorders against orchestral backing -- a setting not used often enough. 'Portrait of a Lady' climbs a undulating mountain on that peerless string section. (Dare I say it, probably depicting a female orgasm. Sorry, delicate eyes.) 'Flowers of Firenze', led by oboe, is all pastoral beauty -- one of the few tracks that feels content in its emotion rather than surging towards something else. 'Twilight Cellos' foreshadows the score's central theme (still to heard) in a muted arrangement.

Special mention must be saved for 'A Certain Light', truly one of the greatest pieces written for a film. Early on in Henry James' novel Portrait of a Lady, the author writes of his heroine, Isabel Archer, and her thoughts on love: "She knew that if a certain light did dawn, she would give herself completely to it." Now when Isabel does that, her affections are sadly misplaced and manipulated by a man who doesn't deserve her. But Kilar scores the optimism of the woman -- a heady peak of romantic love that makes a lot of film's love themes feel trite to me. This seems to be an edited version of the theme. Certainly enough of a taste:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSPtuEEY7wo
The muted arrangement of the theme from 'Twlight Cellos' is revisited for solo wind in 'Cypresses'. (Beautifully recorded. The unaccompanied solo here as much as much presence as the presence of the score.)

The Schubert in the middle breaks it all up (two pieces for Piano, another for String Quartet), before a number of the themes are re-presented in 'Epilogue: Portrait of a Lady', 'End Credits' and the rhapsodic reprise of 'A Certain Light': 'The Kiss'. Two new themes - two of the best - are introduced in this last section to add to the existing 5 (6?). 'Phantasms of Love' is a waltz that is most definitely not pretty. When I was younger and imagined making a fantasy epic, I always saw this music playing over a battle in the snow. (Most would put it over a love scene, which is pretty much what Campion does.) 'Love Remains' sits at the opposite end of the spectrum - a reflective piece more understated than much else on the album.

The random purchasing habit has stuck with me. It has given me as many dogs -- probably more actually -- as it has delights. But this was definitely the best I stumbled onto this way.

For me, and i just shockingly discovered i am as much of a Zimmer lover as the Princess,

HANS ZIMMER - Gladiator
HANS ZIMMER - The Thin Red Line
ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL - Final Fantasy: the spirits within
JAMES NEWTON HOWARD - Devil's Advocate

- edited to add: sorry mate, couldn't make up my mind it's like asking a parent which of his kids he loves more

Nothing i ever heard since, came close to the experience i have every single time i play those albums.

Let me add one more

I feel benevolent. It is Christmas after all

...and why not, Gladiator films are always a bit.....ermmmmm....gay.

I'll start with the obvious, but it is the way it is, my first place is what you think it is.

Hans Zimmer - The Thin Red Line

I've said a lot about this score already and yet...

It's something I keep returning to. Both the film and the score. I tend to get back to the film once a year, if only for a reminder why I want to do what I want to do.

If you want to know why (probably you don't, but the explanation is a part of the game :mrgreen: ) I stay a Hans Zimmer fan all these years, with both the delights and dogs (beautiful phrase, Michael) he's done in, especially, recent years (though as far as I'm concerned in years 1998-2003 he, almost, could do no wrong)... It's not the fact that he was so nice to me personally, not even the recording session (to a score I sadly disliked). It's this gem. This music does something to me on a personally emotional level that I can't describe.

And this, to me, is the magic film music, or in fact music in general, can achieve. As much as I can analyze, interpret this score, which I am constantly getting back to also on a research level (I explored most of philosophers the director was researching, one, and possibly a particularly poignant for myself, I still have to read up), the metaphysical, and I'm not afraid of using that word here, mystery is still present. Why does this music touch me so much? Why do I keep listening to it, to feel... myself?

A bit of a personal story is that I don't have exactly the highest self-esteem, to put it delicately, and what this music does to me definitely is that it makes me feel good with myself. There is also the bit from the classic Nietzsche quote: "When you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes into you" (I might have shortened it, I quote from memory) and a Japanese poet said once: "You are not looking at your reflection in the mirror, it's your reflection looking at you). And this insight is what Hans' score gives me. In my article I have written about the music's part in understanding the character, meaning that the music allows them to speak, but on my contact something else happens, but still connected to that assessment I made.

The music is trying to understand the characters of the movie. But when I am listening to the score apart from the film (not doing that very often, though I made a playful deal with myself to put it in every Now Playing incarnation on this forum, call it a personal quirk), I feel that I am in a moment of an emotional dialogue. Maybe Freud would mention projection here or things like that. But what I feel is that the music tries to understand me. Listening to it, after years of knowing it, etc., made me suddenly realize that the track Stone in My Heart is the most perfect description of my personality (and, to an extent, life) that I've ever encountered or expressed. This is a dialogue I feel and this is a dialogue I need. Sometimes it's the only about an hour in my whole day when I don't feel lonely.

And for that... I'll always feel grateful to Hans Zimmer.

Beautifully put Pawel. The music of Hans and others has also saved me in dark moments many times.

It's the first time I wrote about it so personally. I kinda try to stay analytical and critical (though the latter - not with this score). I always try to be as objective as I can get about film music, it's partly about my inherent need for understanding. It's both practical (I still want to be a filmmaker) and emotional. My understanding or at least my attempt at it is, as I feel, I can give back to my favorite artists for the emotions and all the good tuff they give me.