Varese Sarabande 40th Anniversary restrospective project

Spartacus

Music composed & conducted by ALEX NORTH plus interpretations on the Love Theme by various artists

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

It was always the plan of Varese producer Robert Townson and composer Jerry Goldsmith to add Alex North’s magnificent score to Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic Spartacus to their growing list of new recordings of the legendary composer’s works. Sadly, the untimely death of Goldsmith in 2004 prevented this from ever happening. However, to mark his 1000th album for Varese, Robert put together the ultimate love-letter to this masterwork.

In 2010 he released an elaborate 6 CD and 1 DVD set, presented in a beautifully designed box with a lavish 168 page book. Box sets are nothing new of course, but they are normally compilations or collections. Spartacus was, and will perhaps remain, the most comprehensive and detailed release ever of a single film score.

The film was a tale of struggle, both on and behind the screen.

Spartacus’ troubled production is well-documented, but its daring homoerotic references, socio-political undertones and realistic violence set it apart from other historical films of the time. It was a perfect storm of exceptional writing, acting and art direction, and remains a benchmark for other films tackling similar subjects, such as Gladiator. A groundbreaking film demanded a groundbreaking score, one that supported properly its mix of epic scale, turbulent drama, heroic optimism and tender intimacy.

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Alex North delivered in spades, his blaring main title setting out his stall as he delivered music for a Rome outwardly mighty but inwardly corrupt and decaying (as literally portrayed

by Saul Bass’ incredible main title design). There are no missteps - this is musical perfection. His love theme is sweet and heartfelt, his martial music exciting and brutal. Some believe Alex North to be the greatest film composer who ever lived. Jerry Goldsmith was one of them, saying “Of all of us, he’s the master.” And who would dare to argue with Jerry Goldsmith about film music?

The first CD in the set presents the surviving stereo mixes of the score, some 72 minutes worth. While there are notable omissions, this is the disc I suspect gets played most by fans because of its richness and depth. CDs two and three present the full score, but in mono. Before you pass judgement, IT’S THE FRICKIN’ COMPLETE SCORE TO SPARTACUS – and the sound is actually excellent.

Disc four is 43 minutes of alternative takes, preliminaries and demos etc., a fascinating tour of North’s process and creativity. Discs five and six take the set above and beyond the call of duty, devoted as they are to brand new interpretations of North’s beautiful love theme no less than 22 times by some of the world’s finest musicians and arrangers. For all of its outward delicacy, this exercise demonstrates exactly how robust and flexible this theme actually was.

Finally, John Williams, Christopher Young, David Newman and many others appear in a special 95 minute talkingheads style documentary on the impact of the score.

Spartacus is a simply magnificent set, and still available.

You really do need this if you’re serious about film music.

So, selection one down, 39 steps to go (see what I did there!?) I hope you enjoyed this first one, I’ll be back again tomorrow with a release that, while nowhere near as elaborate physically, was no less as important and excellent a score and our first of several visits to the work of Jerry Goldsmith.

Lionheart volumes 1 & 2

Music composed & conducted by JERRY GOLDSMITH

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Lionheart was the seventh and final collaboration between composer Jerry Goldsmith and director Franklin J. Schaffner.

Goldsmith frequently described this relationship as the most rewarding and creative of his career, and given that it brought us Planet of the Apes, Patton and Islands in the Stream amongst others that’s pretty hard to contradict.

Sadly, this 1987 historical adventure film was undermined by studio nerves and poor distribution (I believe it wasn’t released in US cinemas at all). Based very roughly on a true story from the twelfth century, it uses as a backdrop the “Children’s Crusade”, where young people from across Europe rallied to a call from King Richard the Lionheart to drive Muslims from the Holy Land. The film follows young knight Robert (Eric Stoltz), as he attempts to protect the children who gather to his side from the evil Black Prince (Gabriel Byrne), a disgruntled crusader who sees an opportunity for enrichment by selling vulnerable children into slavery.

Schaffner turned out a decent enough film, better than those who’ve never seen it probably imagine it to be, but one alas that was barely shown and remained obscure even after the advent of home video formats. The movie is now all but forgotten, but the same cannot be said of the score – a stunning and complex work from one of Jerry Goldsmith’s busiest and most creative periods.

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Lionheart overflows with memorable themes (particularly a noble, determined march for Robert), powerful action music, gentle romance and tense malevolence (notably a dark, inventive twist on the Dies Irae for the Black Prince). Over three decades since it was written, Lionheart still dazzles with its invention, and exhilarates and rewards with each repeat listen.

Goldsmith’s prominent integration of synthesisers into the framework of his orchestra remains controversial to some purists, and never more so than with this film. I remember reading a review at the time that criticised his use of electronic texture and colour for a movie set in the Middle Ages as anachronistic. That reviewer in my personal opinion completely missed the point. Goldsmith, I suspect, had quickly identified that the film’s true core was the children and not the time it was set, and the synths add a jaunty playfulness that supports their initial naivety about the truth of their peril, or crystallises their fear and uncertainty of the locations and situations they encounter. For me, their inclusion is a true highlight of the score.

Mostly though, Lionheart’s score was well received, and some consider it a prototype for later works for historic adventures such as First Knight and The 13th Warrior. It was initially released over two volumes running roughly 40 minutes per release, this being a time when a vinyl version was still the one most likely to sell best and so timings and sequencings were determined by the older format. However, I’d only just bought my first CD player and, despite the extra cost, couldn’t resist buying these (with my student grant cheque, being at university at the time! Who needs food though when you can have Jerry?!)

Varese released a single-CD version in 1994 called The Epic Symphonic Score, which was stuffed with the best music from the two volumes and presented in a running order closer to the movie. All three CDs are still to be found, provided one is prepared to pay the prices being asked. The music, however, is priceless. Lionheart is an essential part of any Goldsmith collection, and definitely recommended as a priority for younger or newer fans still discovering Jerry’s back catalogue.

Acts of violence and oppression also feature heavily in tomorrow’s choice, though then we will be looking ahead into the far future rather than back into the distant past.

Hope to see you then.

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone 40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

The Varèse CD Club was (and remains) an innovative subbrand conceived to offer fans rare, highly desired scores in strictly limited numbers and by mail order only, thus allowing some of the obstacles associated with full releases to be sidestepped. Established in 1989 (with flyers sent out to those responding to ads in regular releases in those pre-internet days!) it was, to my knowledge, the first such endeavour by a soundtrack label, and its releases would often quickly sell out.

Even with a hiatus of several years there have now been many CD Club releases, filling some major gaps in collections and discographies. Each teasing announcement of forthcoming releases by Robert Townson triggers a huge amount of excited speculation from fans, all hoping that those soundtracks on their personal wish list will make the new batch.

It was through the CD Club that fans were able to first own The ‘burbs, Flesh + Blood, Cherry 2000, Predator and so many others. While some titles (all these examples included) have since been superceded by even more elaborate or expanded versions, there are also those that remain exclusive to the Club, for example Raggedy Man, Heartbeeps, We’re No Angels and this, a score that had been on my own internal wish list for many, many years.

Spacehunter was a film attempting to cash in on several genres considered “hot” in 1983. With a self-mythologising subtitle (“Adventures in the Forbidden Zone”), it tried to merge the sci-fi boom begun by Star Wars with the post-apocalyptic anti-heroics of Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior in the US) and a short-lived (and often frankly hilarious – Jaws 3D, I’m looking at you!) 1980s revival of 3D.

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The end result had trouble figuring out what film it wanted to be, though Elmer Bernstein’s score most certainly did not. It is true to say there are more obvious and famous Bernstein scores to choose from (and who knows I may later, wink wink!), but for big, bold and exciting, Spacehunter is to me the composer at his very best.

Like many A-list composers Bernstein had started at the bottom, making the best of micro budget jobs in the early 1950s as he worked to establish his name. This period had included risible flicks Robot Monster and Cat Women of the Moon, after which Bernstein, perhaps understandably, seemed to avoid science fiction. By the 1980s he was one of the most respected and busiest composers in Hollywood but, with studios desperate to cash in on the juggernaut started by George Lucas, it was perhaps inevitable that sci-fi projects would once again come his way.

Topping and tailing the decade with the largely forgotten Saturn 3 and Slipstream, he would also compose music for Heavy Metal, Spacehunter and Ghostbusters (a horror comedy with sci-fi elements) in between. These latter three were also produced by Ivan Reitman, who Bernstein had worked with on several comedies. All were subsequently graced by exceptional scores, though only one (Heavy Metal) was granted a proper LP release at the time. Ghostbusters’ album was mostly songs, while the other three did so badly at the box office that soundtracks weren’t considered viable (though all have since been released, Ghostbusters also on Varèse CD Club).

It would be 2005 when Varèse released Spacehunter, some 22 years after the film was made. The score centres on a powerful, brassy and rhythmically urgent theme associated with bounty hunter Wolff (Peter Strauss) as he scours a

plague-ravaged colony world for three women being held by villain Overdog (the dependably manic Michael Ironside, complete with giant mechanical claws). Wolff’s travels in his armoured truck gave Bernstein ample opportunity to produce some fabulous and energetic variations, often given a percussive doggedness through snares and tambourine.

For his uncouth and (initially) unwanted companion Niki (Molly Ringwald), ostensibly the comedy relief, Bernstein utilised whimsy, her rebellious antics given shape on the Ondes Martenot, an instrument Bernstein favoured greatly during this period and played by regular collaborator Cynthia Millar. However, the eerie sound also captured the character’s vulnerability, which she masks with a veneer of toughness, though eventually she can hide it no longer, giving Bernstein the chance to swell her motif to pleading, emotive strings.

Action cues are often hard and aggressive, the orchestra snarling and growling, stabbing and chopping as Bernstein lets us know that many of Wolff’s encounters are struggles to survive and not acts of heroism.

Spacehunter is a thrilling, epic, sometimes fun, sometimes dark score, full of interesting ideas and effects. The CD is long out of print, though the more generous run of 3000 means there are usually some for sale online at prices that range from the reasonable to the ludicrous.

And so we leave behind Terra XI, and to be honest that’s a good thing as it’s not very hospitable. Unlike Europe, where we head tomorrow for a release that to me stands as one of Varese Sarabande’s greatest “hidden treasures”.

The Seville Film Music Concerts Music composed & conducted by MAURICE JARRE & JOSE NIETO

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Recorded live on the 15th (Nieto) and 20th (Jarre) of May 1989 in The Lope de Vega Theatre, Seville, Spain, this was for me a dream release. Firstly, being a huge admirer of Jarre’s work it was a chance to hear a concert I simply could not get to (being an impoverished student at the time), and at a time when commercially available recordings of live music were mostly the domain of pop and rock.

Secondly, while a CD of Jarre’s concert alone would have undoubtedly sold, Varese took a punt on pairing it with music from a brilliant Spanish composer, Jose Nieto – a very talented musician not particularly well known outside of his native country. This willingness to release relatively obscure and foreign music has long been one of Varese’s greatest services to fans.

My main reason for buying it was that it presented excerpts from the Spanish’s composer’s stunning work for the excellent TV miniseries Captain James Cook, starring a career-best Keith Michell. I’d watched the show when broadcast (Cook is a local hero, born close to my home town) and fell in love with the music, a classically-styled orchestral score with a beautiful, evocative theme and clever use of ethnic percussion not dissimilar in approach to Elmer Bernstein’s Hawaii.

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A soundtrack was never released, much to my chagrin, and thus this wonderful 12-minute suite is the only way to enjoy it away from the show. The selections thankfully include some of the score’s highlights - Cook’s joyous arrival at Otahiti as islanders paddle out canoes to welcome his ship, and the death of the captain, a disturbing low hum under imposing native drums that gives way to a tragic blast of the captain’s theme as his crew, out in a jolly boat, see his bloodied coat raised up from the scrum of islanders attacking him (a wonderfully sensitive and clever way to show the violent death of a character the audience has been investing in for hours).

The Nieto concert is all the more remarkable in that it works even without knowledge of the films it was written for. Aside from Captain James Cook I could put none of the other tracks in context. That didn’t matter. Nieto takes us on a delightful audio ride, beginning with The Night of Spanish Film, an introductory overture with some great orchestral clowning, before presenting score suites ranging from jazz saxophone to the musical stylings of Spain to hints of the Middle East, encompassing everything from heartbreaking melancholy to heroic bombast.

The Jarre selection is a mix of the expected (suites from David Lean films, Witness) and the less well-known (at least to general audiences). There is a distinctly Oriental selection from Shogun, the lullaby from The Damned, and a very generous suite of music for films by Georges Franju, with some fabulous percussion. It also opens in spectacular fashion with what was, at the time, the only way to get his marvellous Thunderdome fanfare from the third Mad Max movie.

Quality wise it barely picks up any audience noise (the odd cough), and the CD is available online at very decent prices. I would heartily recommend this, especially to those who don’t know Nieto’s music.

As for tomorrow, we’ll be truly buckling some swashes, so until then – adiós!

The Adventures of Robin Hood/ The Sea Hawk 40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Today we delve a way back into Varese’s earlier catalogue, and a choice more personal for me than most. My dad Albert grew up in poverty in northern England of the 1930s. It was a real “Angela’s Ashes” life, which he would escape by sneaking into the local cinema. There he developed a lifelong passion for film music that stayed with him until he passed away last year aged 86 (at his funeral we played Forever Young, a score he loved that also summed up his outlook).

His favourite film and score remained always The Adventures of Robin Hood. He would tell me how he would walk home through the grimy streets whistling the music, desperate to commit it to memory. Upon hearing this recording when I first bought it over fifty years later, he literally wept with joy. It is one of countless beautiful memories I have of sharing film music with my dad. Sharing, to me, is what film music is all about, be it through albums, concerts, gatherings like those we had in The Goldsmith Society, and now social media.

While Erich Wolfgang Korngold composed music for a variety of films and stars, he is perhaps best associated with Errol Flynn, the very epitome of a Hollywood leading man and, for a while at least, unstoppable box-office juggernaut. He was larger than life both on screen and off, and died of a heart attack in 1959 aged just 50. His excesses apparently led the coroner who did his autopsy to declare that he could have mistaken the internal organs for those of an 85 year old.

But in his prime nobody could cut a dash like the absurdly handsome and charming star, a pragmatist about his own acting talent who was the first to admit that Korngold’s music enhanced his on-screen presence and emotional range greatly.

Music composed by ERICH WOLFGANG KORNGOLD, Varujan Kojian conducting The Utah Symphony Orchestra CD Club VCL 0805 1038

Beginning in 1935 with Captain Blood, the composer established a “sound” for swashbuckling adventure movies that could still be felt decades later. Take James Horner’s Laughing Bandit cue in The Rocketeer for example, the composer clearly having a lot of fun aping Korngold (as was actor Timothy Dalton, channelling Flynn), while John Debney’s Cutthroat Island pays a truly affectionate homage to The Sea Hawk. And, lest we forget, there was a little something that John Williams did in 1977 that, he said, Korngold had partly inspired.

The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938 and The Sea Hawk in 1940 were major works. The former borrowed from Korngold’s 1919 overture Sursum Corda Op. 13, and won Korngold his second Oscar (after 1936’s Anthony Adverse). The latter ran for all but 20 minutes of The Sea Hawk’s two-hour plus running time. The scores sparkled with bold themes, heraldic flourishes, breathless action, sly wit and lush romance. To quote film historian Rudy Behlmer, “Korngold’s original and distinctive style was influenced by the Wagnerian leitmotif, the orchestral virtuosity of Richard Strauss, the delicacy and broad melodic sweep of Puccini, and the long-line development of Gustav Mahler.”

Back then, however, soundtrack records were almost unknown. Composers wrote the music, the film came out, and... well, that was it. While subsequent decades would see a rise in their popularity, film music LPs tended to be for current releases only and older scores seemed destined to remain overlooked. This all changed, of course, in 1972, when conductor and arranger Charles Gerhardt released an album of newly recorded Korngold music on RCA Victor. Prepared with care and love by Gerhardt and played with gusto by the

National Philharmonic Orchestra, which he had founded in 1970 with violinist and contractor Sidney Sax, The Sea Hawk: The Classic Film Scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a surprise hit. It proved there was a demand for such recordings, and by 1978 Gerhardt had recorded over a dozen more albums. In many ways we could call Gerhardt the father of modern score reconstruction and recording, breaking new ground on which many others would build.

One of these was Varujan Kojian, an Armenian-American conductor who from 1980 to 1983 was a director of the Utah Symphony.

Digitally recorded in the acoustically renowned Salt Lake City Symphony Hall, the Kojian recordings were supervised by the composer’s son, respected producer and music editor George Korngold, and expanded on Gerhardt’s short suites by focusing on individual scores for each release. At last, fans could have something akin to a proper soundtrack in their collection, performed and recorded to the highest standard. There was still music missing, of course, and some cues were reworked to present them more as a listening experience than an exact recreation of the film versions.

Even though newer recordings have since filled in the gaps and presented the scores as composed for the film, there is still a magic about these two albums, a vibrancy and flow that seems to encapsulate the joie de vivre of these masterpieces. For me, there is no better version of my favourite cue from Robin Hood, the Coronation Procession.

Kojian’s recordings are the versions I return to most.

Mom and Dad Save the World Music composed & conducted by JERRY GOLDSMITH

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Today we return to the music of Jerry Goldsmith, and a very worthy score for one of the most obscure and unfairly maligned films of his career.

1992’s Mom and Dad Save the World was a little seen oddity, a science fiction comedy about middle-aged suburban couple Dick and Marge Nelson (Jeffrey Jones and Teri Garr), whose tired marriage is revitalised when they are kidnapped to alien planet Spengo (egotistically named after its ludicrous dictator Tod Spengo, AKA Tod The Destroyer).

The insecure and vain Tod (played fearlessly by Jon Lovitz) intends to destroy the Earth, jealous of its larger size, but while having one last long-range gloat before firing his Death Ray Laser he spies Marge exercising in her yard and, smitten, determines to make her his queen.

Spengo is a wonderfully insane place, a planet literally inhabited by idiots (“I’m the cleverest one here, and I’m an idiot!” explains rightful King Raff, played by Monty Python legend Eric Idle). This is a place where booby-traps work because they have the words “Pick Me Up” written on them, aircraft have ejector seats but no straps, carnivorous mushrooms prowl the sewers and Tod’s servants are anthropomorphised, cross-breeding bulldogs and goldfish (I’m really not making any of this up).

Ironically for a film so packed with comic invention, its production was not a happy one. Filmed as Dick and Marge Save the World in 1990, it took two years to secure a release, and even then only for one week. It made back just $2m of a $14m budget and critics were savage – indeed, it retains a professional aggregate score of just 9% on Rotten Tomatoes.

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This is a shame because Mom and Dad Save the World is not a bad film, just an acquired taste. I personally regard it as great fun, and love its visual style - a pleasingly quirky amalgamation of The Wizard of Oz and Flash Gordon. Writers Chris Matheson (son of I Am Legend author Richard Matheson) and Ed Solomon crafted jokes that are often laugh out loud funny, especially those involving Spengo’s inept military forces.

Solomon, best known for writing the Bill and Ted films and Men In Black, also maintains his amusing tradition of including an inversion of his own name, De Nomolos (in this case, an ice moon).

While audiences didn’t seem to “get” Mom and Dad Save the World, Jerry Goldsmith clearly did. Here we find the composer fully flexing his comedic muscles, starting with a wonderfully bombastic clockwork march for Spengo. As he had in Gremlins 2, he uses a lot of “Mickey Mousing”, his music precisely burnishing comical salutes, a scroll across a map, the flicking of dust off a uniform, and even a synthesised “tweety bird” effect for Tod’s mind control drug.

For moments of (faux) peril, drama and action the composer responds accordingly, though always with a tongue slightly in cheek. Numerous gags are sold through music that turns from funny-serious to seriously funny on a dime (for example the Death Cart, a military vehicle that really has to be seen).

The composer’s peerless ability to distil emotions with sensitivity and subtlety is evident too in a sweet and heartfelt love theme for the married Earth couple, which is beefed up into some sweeping travel music as the pair are whisked to Spengo and back by a giant magnet (while in their station wagon – like I said, I’m not making this up).

As for Tod’s choral palace introduction... well, once heard, never forgotten!

As the icing on the cake, the score was performed with aplomb by the always magnificent National Philharmonic Orchestra. Varese’s 40 minute CD presents all of the score’s major themes and ideas and makes for a very satisfying listen.

Mom and Dad is, for sure, a score ripe for rediscovery, like a few others from around the same period such as Angie, Mr Baseball, Love Field and Malice – scores overlooked because the films they supported didn’t do well at the box office and also because they were overshadowed by better-known Goldsmith works from the same time like Basic Instinct, Forever Young, Medicine Man and The Shadow.

Vertigo

Music composed by BERNARD HERRMANN Joel McNeely conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Vertigo is a dizzying experience. I know, I know... sorry, I just had to get that out of my system.

But bad gag aside, Vertigo probably comes as close as a film and score can to literally inducing the condition of its title.

There are few sights more unsettling than that of James Stewart hanging by his fingertips, looking down into the alley below him as director Alfred Hitchcock delivers what is one of cinema’s greatest uses of the dolly zoom. Likewise, there are few sounds that more perfectly accompany the image for which they were composed than Bernard Herrmann’s harp glissandi, crystallising Stewart’s helpless terror.

Vertigo is likely a film and score that are already familiar to most film music aficionados - if not, you really need to change that! Released in 1958, it is a powerful, disturbing tale of obsession and control set against the stunning backdrop of San Francisco, with Kim Novak perhaps the most famous of all of Hitchcock’s platinum blonde muses.

Bernard Herrmann’s score, his fourth for the director, is regarded by many as the high watermark of their collaborations, and also one of his most accessible to general listeners. The Prelude, playing over imagery from the great designer Saul Bass, surges and floats over hypnotic spirals, dark enough to disturb, melodic enough to beguile, and setting in motion one of cinema’s most psychologically attuned scores.

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Herrmann understood exactly the role his music had to play, and is careful never to overwhelm or tip the hand of the story. Often the score is an understated accompaniment to Hitchcock’s slow burning mystery, gently pulsing beneath the surface, lurking in the background much like Stewart’s character as he tails Novak in the early part of the movie.

When a scene required it, though, there was no holding him back.

The “Scene D’Amour” is a case in point - a captivating love theme, tempered with a hint of melancholy, trembling in anticipation of the sweeping passion to which it heads.

Perhaps the most famous and revered of all the score’s cues though is the one for Stewart’s part-animated nightmare, its disjointed imagery made all the more unnerving through the genius merging of slicing strings, brass and woodwind throbs and castanets, all to a habanera rhythm.

Vertigo had been released on CD by Mercury in 1990, but that was based on the original vinyl and ran just over half an hour.

There were also numerous suites and themes on compilations conducted by the likes of Elmer Bernstein and Lalo Schifrin.

It was all good, but it just wasn’t enough. An expanded Vertigo was for a long time one of the holy grails of film music enthusiasts, and finally in 1995 that grail was delivered.

Composer/conductor Joel McNeely was commissioned

by Robert Townson to lead the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in a brand new recording. Running close to double the length of Mercury’s selection, this was an important project with a nigh on perfect performance, while the depth and detail of the sound is simply stunning.

Purists will probably be more drawn to the expanded original 1958 recording, which Varese released a just year later (VSD-5759) after the stereo masters were unearthed during a restoration of the film. Famously conducted not

by Herrmann but by Muir Matheson due to a musicians’ strike requiring it to be recorded in Europe, suddenly Vertigo’s fans had an embarrassment of riches. However, as excellent as that album is, it simply cannot compete with the newly recorded version in terms of sound quality.

The McNeely recording is a true labour of love that remains for me the definitive release, and is certainly the one audiophiles need to go for. Any film music collection without this is missing an essential component.

The Right Stuff

Music composed and conducted by BILL CONTI

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

“Say, Hot Dog... what the hell does ‘astronaut’ mean, anyway?”

“Star Voyager.”

“Star Voyager? I kinda like the sound of that.”

1983’s The Right Stuff, based on the novel by Tom Wolfe, follows America’s early space programme from the perspective of its first seven astronauts, plus a sideways glance at test pilot Chuck Yeager, the WW2 fighter ace who became the first person to break the sound barrier.

The film had a difficult production and initially poor reception, making back only $21m of its $27m budget. It has since, however, been reassessed as a modern classic - a colourful, optimistic picture of American ingenuity and courage before the Vietnam War and Watergate plunged it into darker, more turbulent times.

Part of the aforementioned troubled production involved issues with original composer John Barry, though what exactly happened remains unclear. Barry claimed in an interview he found Kaufman hard to understand (apparently the director wanted one cue to sound like “you’re walking in the desert and you see a cactus, and you put your foot on it, but it just starts growing up through your foot.”). This “lost score” is something of an urban myth among collectors, desperate to unearth it.

They might be in for quite a wait, as Barry revealed that while he had worked on some ideas, nothing was ever properly written or recorded before he left the project.

With the release date looming, Bill Conti was brought in as a replacement with a clear instruction from the producers: ignore Kaufman, who favoured an intimate approach, and give us something loud and big. Conti did just that, nabbing himself an Academy Award in the process.

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The Right Stuff divided film music fans from the outset. Due to the eleventh hour nature of the commission, Conti had to work tightly to a temp track that included Holst’s The Planets, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto and Henry Mancini’s The White Dawn, insisting because of this that the original pieces received credit.

For this reason some have accused the score of lacking originality. I still remember an amusing conversation I had years ago with a fellow fan who complained that Conti should not have won the Oscar because his score used tunes that we’d heard before. It should, he said, have gone to John Williams for Return of the Jedi. Think about that for a second...

However, The Right Stuff score also won many fans who loved its adventurous, patriotic bravado and expansive sense of wonder. I’m one of them, but despite Conti’s Oscar success a soundtrack album failed to appear. The composer had prepared one featuring about 37 minutes of re-recorded music (roughly the average length of a vinyl back in the day) but unfortunately, as they say in the movie, it was a case of “No bucks, no Buck Rogers”. The poor box office saw the LP cancelled, but not before it was promoted on some posters with the line “Original Soundtrack Available on Geffen Records”.

Amazingly, to add insult to injury, somewhere along the line the original session tapes vanished. Varese came to the rescue partially in 1986, with Conti conducting the London Symphony Orchestra for an excellent, digitally recorded album that featured a slender selection from the score, along with music from Conti’s exceptional miniseries score North and South.

In 2009 though, at last the LP Conti had prepared some 26 years beforehand emerged through the Varese CD Club.

About half of the cues had featured on the combined album, showcasing the two primary ideas of the score, the first a bombastic fanfare/march usually connected to the ambitious, poster-boy astronauts (though its first appearance is actually as Yeager breaks Mach One), the second a more measured but still heroic theme associated with Yeager’s endeavours.

The new tracks filled in some important gaps, such as the short but effective pieces for the spectre of the Russian space program, complete with jangling balalaika. Also present is the otherworldy, triumphant synthesised cue as Yeager passes the sound barrier, and the lovely fusion of Conti’s theme and Mancini’s White Dawn as John Glenn (Ed Harris) orbits the Earth.

For me though the highlight of the score is Yeager’s near fatal crash in the NF-104, albeit presented out of film order and missing the transparent strings that open it in the film.

In a section not used in the movie, Conti also beautifully merges the minor theme introduced for the Starfighter with the Yeager theme.

Some source music also appears (especially pleasing for Texans), as well as a pop version of the theme that, to contemporary ears, is a bit dated (though this said, it does actually begin with the same few seconds of music that open the movie).

The Right Stuff is a brilliant listen, with some exciting variations on the primary theme and a broad range of styles that keep it interesting throughout.

Anastasia

Music composed and conducted by ALFRED NEWMAN

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

In those heady days when online buying was a twinkle in the eye of Jeff Bezos, we shopped in record stores (remember those?). The northern branch of the Goldsmith Society (well, me, Barry Spence and Russell Thewlis) would meet on weekends in Newcastle and raid one of the greatest independent music shops ever to exist - Windows of the Arcade. LPs, CDs, sheet music, instruments – it had them all (and still does!) We would spend hours flicking through the huge racks, seeing what new treasures had appeared for sale, and debating our buys over lunch and a crafty pint.

Those were wonderful days, and what for me being a film music fan is all about – great music, great friends and great conversations.

One of the things we most loved about Varese Sarabande was the way, amongst all the new releases of scores for films then hitting the cinema, they also took advantage of existing back catalogues wherever possible to reissue albums previously available on other labels. Often using the LP masters, but with improved sound and new liner notes, week by week you just never knew what would turn up next! With no internet for spoilers it was exciting times!

Case in point... this! Alfred Newman is, of course, one of the most important figures in film music. Despite being prolific, each score he wrote never felt rushed, compromised or less than finely crafted to the film. He was a true artist and consummate professional, and his talents saw him rise to the very top of the ladder as musician and department head. He also had a keen ear for new talent, and was generous with opportunities for those he felt worthy (and I’ll stop here, as one such example may or may not be featuring further along this list!)

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Ever since I heard its theme as conducted by Charles Gerhardt, 1956’s Anastasia has been a favourite of mine although I have to confess it was a race to the wire for Day 9 between this and Airport (VSD-5436). Anastasia won out because, as rollicking and infectious as Airport is, I’ve always been a sucker for a sweeping Golden Age themes – and this is one of the greatest.

The legend of Anastasia was shaped largely by a play by Marcelle Maurette, based on a mix of truth and rumours.

After the execution of the Russian royal family at the hands of Bolsheviks in 1918, one body, that of the Grand Duchess Anastasia, was never found. Rumours persisted that she had escaped. The play, and later film, follows a plot by loyalist Russian exiles in Paris to try and gain access to the Romanov wealth by grooming an amnesiac, suicidal girl to pose as the heiress. However, she proves so convincing that the leader of the plot, General Bounine (Yul Brynner), comes to believe she may actually be the Duchess.

The staggeringly beautiful Ingrid Bergman won an Oscar as the disturbed title character, despite being, at 40, far too old. She wasn’t the only thing worth looking at. Visually, with locations in Paris, England and Copenhagen, Anastasia was the type of film CinemaScope was invented for.

Alfred Newman’s score was one of the many for which he garnered his copious Oscar nominations. Its main theme, running throughout the score, has echoes of the Russian and European romantic masters, in keeping with the subject. It aches with yearning, as befits a woman constantly seeking her own identity, balancing fragile femininity against the opulent grandeur of the world she is drawn into. It is, in my opinion, one of the composer’s very best.

Although not credited, some pieces do contain music from various classical and folk works, and there have been those who, because of this, regard Anastasia as a lesser work from Newman. Regarding this notion I have to ask does anybody really think Alfred Newman was a composer who needed to plagiarise or cut corners? Lest we forget, Newman was also one the greatest arrangers and conductors in Hollywood, and whenever he used existing material it was with good reason and was integrated seamlessly with his own ideas. Indeed, one of his most lauded scores, How the West Was Won, treads the same path but with American traditional songs rather than European waltzes, but seems to be forgiven for it.

In 1997 Don Bluth Studios made an animated version of Anastasia, and composing the score was, fittingly, Alfred Newman’s son David. While also a success, the 1956 version remains the definitive version for many.

Tomorrow we go from one film about a beautiful, melancholy woman to another, though one with an entirely different musical approach.

A Streetcar Named Desire

Music composed by ALEX NORTH Jerry Goldsmith conducting the National Philharmonic Orchestra

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Groundbreaking, visionary and genius - three words that are all bandied about far too freely in these days of excitable, Twitterbait hyperbole, but all three truly applied to Alex North’s powerful, jazz-laden 1951 score to A Streetcar Named Desire.

This CD will always be have a special place in my heart, because I was honoured to be present at one of the days of recording in London back in 1995. To see the greatest living composer of film scores conducting the music of his friend and inspiration... To hear some of the best musicians in the world plying their trades - from the hammering pianos to commanding trumpet to growling saxophone to the delicate twinkling of the celesta... It was magical, exciting, fascinating an experience I can never forget. But even this hadn’t been the case, this CD would still be an essential purchase.

Director Elia Kazan had garnered much critical acclaim with his stage production of Tennessee Williams’ play on Broadway, and the writer encouraged him to pursue a cinema version with himself writing the screenplay. Having established themselves as the leads, Marlon Brando, Kim Hunter and Karl Malden reprised their roles as Stanley Kowalski, Stella Kowalski and Harold “Mitch” Mitchell respectively. The one role vetoed by studio executives was that of Blanche DuBois, with Vivian Leigh drafted in from Laurence Olivier’s London over Broadway’s Jessica Tandy.

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With its strong themes, Streetcar was controversial in its day. Over the course of the story subjects addressed included lies, guilt, domestic violence, mental health, rape and homosexuality. It follows aristocratic southerner Blanche as she seeks refuge in the small New Orleans home of her much less well off sister Stella and her brutish husband Stanley. Rules pertaining to Broadway were much laxer than ones for Hollywood films at the time, and when the movie was threatened with a “Condemned” rating (effectively, a kiss of death) many aspects were toned down. The canny Kazan though played a longer game, storing lost scenes anyway to await the chance to rework the film into his original vision.

This came in 1993, when a director’s cut was finally released to huge acclaim on home video.

The film was a critical success, gaining twelve Academy Award nominations including best original score. Alex North and Kazan had first worked together on Death of a Salesman in 1949, and for Streetcar the composer took film music in a previously untried direction. Scoring was at the time dominated by romantic, European sensibilities. North instead delivered a thunderbolt. Using the distinctly American music form of jazz, he painted a vivid musical portrait of the film’s rough and ready New Orleans surroundings and the often unrefined, troubled characters residing therein.

While jazz in the movies was nothing new, it had always been in the context of on-screen musical numbers or source tracks. North’s genius was to take something known for its improvisational characteristics and ensemble nature, and find a way to work it within the strict timings of a film scene and a full orchestra. The resulting score is exciting, sultry, threatening, melancholy, lively, reflective, tender, dark, and a whole gamut of other emotions. It still startles today, so one can only imagine the effect it had back in 1951.

Sadly Alex North had passed away in 1991 and never got to hear this recording. But because of this CD, along with the others Goldsmith and Robert Townson recorded of his work, music fans can revel some of North’s best scores in incredible sound quality, where no detail is amiss. As Robert Townson says in five simple words in his liner notes, “It was all for Alex.”

Matinee

Music composed & conducted by JERRY GOLDSMITH

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

After Franklin J. Schaffner, Jerry Goldsmith’s second most important composer-director relationship was arguably with Joe Dante. Whereas Schaffner was largely a serious filmmaker who made serious films that required serious scores, Dante’s movies were invariably fun, fantastical and quirky. They allowed Goldsmith to pursue the lighter side of his personality, something he did with a real twinkle in his eye. Dante once joked that he would annoy the composer by temp-tracking the movies he made with Bernard Herrmann’s The Trouble with Harry, though his films actually drew out some of the most imaginative, unique work of Goldsmith’s career.

The pair clearly saw eye-to-eye, Dante even getting the composer to cameo on-screen in Gremlins and Gremlins 2, something Goldsmith swore he would never let happen after having a miserable time on the set of 1965’s In Harm’s Way. The longevity and humour of their friendship was summed up at the 1993 SPFM Career Achievement Award dinner, when Dante semi-roasted Goldsmith to the assembled guests by saying “I’ve known Jerry Goldsmith through several hairstyles and belt sizes”. Their collaboration would continue until the very end of the composer’s life, when 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action (302 066 523 2) became his final screen-used score.

Matinee was released in 1993, but failed to achieve the recognition or success of most of the director’s other films.

Likewise the score is frequently overlooked by fans drawn more to scores for better known films like Gremlins and sequel, Explorers, Innerspace, The ‘burbs (released in limited form by Varèse - twice!), and the recently expanded Small Soldiers (CD Club – VCL 0618 1185). In many ways Matinee is “the lost Dante”.

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Set in Florida during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Matinee follows independent filmmaker Lawrence Woolsey (John Goodman), whose ability to promote his movies far exceeds his ability to make them. Woolsey is a sensationalist - an opportunist showman who enthrals local youngsters with his gimmicky new horror film Mant! (“Half man! Half ant!”)

Mant! is a work of laugh out loud genius, an utterly dreadful a man-in-a-suit exploitation flick Woolsey hopes will profit (“In Atomo-Vision and Rumble-Rama!”) from the possibility of imminent nuclear annihilation. Dante also took a sly swipe at Disney and its anthropomorphising of inanimate objects (like VW Beetles) with Matinee’s other film within a film, The Shook-Up Shopping Cart, which featured a young Naomi Watt.

Matinee is a love letter to the early 1960s and exploitative auteurs like William Castle (who would use gimmicks like buzzers under cinema seats) and Ray Dennis Steckler (who personally drove prints of his films from city to city, foisting them on theatre owners). Critics at the time were impressed.

USA Today’s Mike Clark wrote “Part spoof, part nostalgia trip and part primer in exploitation-pic ballyhoo, Matinee is a sweetly resonant little movie-lovers’ movie”. Many of Dante’s regulars also turned up for the fun, including Robert Picardo, Kevin McCarthy, William Schallert, Belinda Balaski and the ubiquitous Dick Miller.

Jerry Goldsmith composed a score which, like the movie, some fans seem to struggle with. This is a shame as it, like the movie, sparkles with genuine wit and affection for a time gone by. This is a score largely about lazy, nostalgic summers, about young guys who were more concerned with impressing the girl and seeing a man in a rubber ant suit than the shadow of nuclear destruction hanging over them.

Accordingly the music is playful, sweet and sentimental, with a pleasant innocence that is best given shape in a lovely homage to Max Steiner’s Theme from A Summer Place. Woolsey is a snake oil salesman, taking people for a ride with his larger than life facade, but who is ultimately harmless - something Goldsmith lets us know with a plodding, parping rhythm, sliding strings and even the occasional circus-like calliope effect.

It is only as events spiral out of control and the spectre of atomic attack mistakenly rears that Goldsmith unleashes his more dramatic side. He mostly ignores Mant! to direct his focus at the events in the “real world”, his score paying only the slightest lip service to the music used in the film within a film (which used cues arranged and conducted by Dick Jacobs from the likes of It Came from Outer Space, Tarantula, This Island Earth and The Creature from the Black Lagoon).

Matinee is the most obscure of the Goldsmith/Dante partnerships these days, save perhaps the Boo! episode of Amazing Stories, though it maintains a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes – well deserved, because it is indeed funny, clever and charming. The one thing it isn’t (ironically, for a film about a horror movie) is scary. The same most definitely cannot be said about tomorrow’s selection.

Ghost Story

Music composed by PHILIPPE SARDE

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

France has given the world some of its most talented film composers. Think Georges Delerue, Maurice Jarre, Francis Lai, Michel Legrand, Alexandre Desplat, Jean-Claude Petit, Frédéric Talgorn – it’s a list that could be much, much longer, and certainly never complete without Philippe Sarde.

Nominated for an Academy Award for Tess and the winner of many others, M. Sarde has proven himself time and again to be immensely versatile, sensitive, eclectic, and a master of memorable themes. 1981’s Ghost Story is, in my humble opinion, not only one of the composer’s best works, but also one of the finest horror film scores ever written.

Based on the novel by Peter Straub, John Irvin’s film was an old fashioned tale of revenge from beyond the grave, given a modern twist via some grotesque special make-up effects by the great Dick Smith. It tells of four wealthy, arrogant elderly associates who belong to a self-styled gentleman’s club they call the Chowder Society. These characters carry with them a dark secret, having accidentally killed a girl a half century before, a crime they covered up to protect their reputations.

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Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and John Houseman are all outstanding as the older characters, with young actors playing them in flashback. South African actress Alice Krige, who would later find wider fame as the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact, was superb as both the flirtatious living victim and later supernatural nemesis exacting belated revenge on the men and their families. The film looks stunning, with cinematography by Jack Cardiff and matte paintings by Albert Whitlock, both legends within their respective fields.

Philippe Sarde’s score is another major asset, albeit, as the album demonstrates, not always used in the film as he originally wrote it. Utilising a large orchestra, female vocalist and the amazing, dense sound of the pipe organ, Sarde’s score enhances greatly the tension, shocks and romance of the story, all bound by a (literally) hauntingly beautiful main theme.

The composer also provides a sweet, innocent secondary theme for the idyllic flashback scenes, before jealousy and passion lead to tragedy.

A nervous repeating figure, usually split between woodwind and percussion, is employed to keep the listener on edge.

When supernatural events finally occur, the composer’s handling of the film’s horror set pieces is superlative, hammering home the ghost’s attacks with a jarring, terrifying relentlessness.

MCA Records released a record at the time of the film, and Varese Sarabande’s 1990 CD retained the same content.

Of real note for the CD release is the sound quality – for a score recorded nearly four decades ago the depth and detail is amazing. This really could have been performed yesterday.

The Varese CD is long out of print and quite rare, but worth finding. If you only ever buy one Sarde album, make it this.

Or Music Box. Or Fort Saganne. Or Quest For Fire. Or Eve of Destruction. Or L.627. Or Pirates. Or Lord of the Flies. Or The Bear. Or...

And so on to tomorrow’s album, an exciting action classic.

Please join me if you would like to know more.

Starship Troopers

Music composed & conducted by BASIL POLEDOURIS

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Starship Troopers has been one of my favourite films since it was first released in 1997 - and not just because it held the world record for the most rounds of blank ammunition expended in a movie for several years. As reasons go that’s a good one, but there were others - would you like to know more?

Based loosely on Robert Heinlein’s classic novel about a future war against alien arachnids, Starship Troopers is an unforgettable combination of Hollywood big budget action and director Paul Verhoeven’s liberal, darkly humourous European sensibilities. Having grown up in German-occupied Holland and WW2’s aftermath (when many Dutch were forced to eat grass fried in engine oil), Verhoeven was well attuned to Heinlein’s pointed observations about the effects of war on society.

The Deluxe Edition: VCL 0516 1168

anything, it’s more relevant today than ever before, but while its subtext is fairly glaring some critics still managed to miss it and took the film as a literal endorsement of fascism (though SS-styled uniforms didn’t help in that respect!)

Visual effects-wise, the film still stuns with its shots of huge starship fleets and vistas that have literally thousands of “bugs” swarming on screen. Equally worthy of nomination, in my view, would have been Basil Poledouris’ incredible score, though that was not to be. Verhoeven’s Hollywood films alternated between Poledouris and Jerry Goldsmith, and both delivered for him some of their best work. Many fans rank Starship Troopers as second only (if not equal to) his 1982 score to John Milius’ Conan The Barbarian. I can’t argue with that - this is a masterpiece from start to finish.

The director’s propensity for graphic violence on screen was also informed by his childhood memories - he would recall that witnessing Nazi brutality, burning villages and piles of corpses would simultaneously appal and excite him. This duality of response would be worked into films like Flesh + Blood, Robocop, Total Recall and Basic Instinct, where violence was designed to be shockingly extreme but still somehow entertain. Starship Troopers took it to a whole new level, revelling in all manner of gory kills, injuries, dismemberments and mutilations.

Opening with powerful martial drumming, the score is built mainly around two militaristic, brass-dominated themes.

One is weighty and determined and mostly supports the epic scenes of war, primarily the signature Klendathu Drop cue, though it also proves capable of becoming a funereal dirge as the wrecked fleet limps back to Battlestation Ticonderoga.

The other theme is propulsive and triumphant, expressing the confidence of the Federation military. This is often attached to the Mobile Infantry and, by proxy, Casper Van Dien’s lead character Johnny Rico. Both also cleverly appear in variation as source music for the newsreel-like FedNet sections.

Reteaming with Robocop’s writer Ed Numeier (who cameos as a hapless condemned murderer), the film is a subversive political satire that cleverly shines a light on issues such as duty, morality, social status and fitting in, imagining a world where most goals in life (even having babies) are much easier if you are blindly patriotic and agree to serve the state. If

Poledouris does much to define the supporting characters too. The music for Lt. Rasczak (Michael Ironside) is aggressive, brusque and swaggering. “Dizzy” Flores (Dina Meyer) receives a bittersweet theme for her unrequited love for Rico, later becoming her musical eulogy. Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards) has music that, like her, is pretty but rings hollow,

reflecting the way she discards anything and anyone not advantageous to her piloting career.

Not to be outdone, the alien bugs make their presence felt musically too. They swarm and attack to thunderous percussion, slashing strings, stabbing trumpets and growling trombones (the latter especially for the giant Tanker bugs), while their leader, the “Brain Bug”, is given a reverential, quasi-religious sound.

Varese put out an abridged CD at the time of the film (VSD-5877), and though it contained many highlights it excluded some of the best cues in the film. This was a score that begged to be expanded, and thankfully it received the deluxe 2CD treatment in 2016, restoring gems such as Rico’s triumphant winning of a training exercise, a lovely shift from Rasczak’s theme to the “triumph” motif as Rico takes command of the Roughnecks, and the entire evacuation of Whiskey Outpost sequence, which throws just about every action idea from the score into one big, pulse-pounding melting pot.

Basil Poledouris tragically passed away in 2006 aged just 61. He was one of the truly great and most distinctive modern film composers, and still had so much music to write. During the Bad Girls sessions Jerry Goldsmith mentioned that they were friends and would go to the cinema together to hear each other’s scores and joke about who was getting the worst films. When it came to Verhoeven projects that was never an issue.

Memphis Belle

Music composed & conducted by GEORGE FENTON

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

The Memphis Belle was a World War 2 US Army Air Force B17 “Flying Fortress”, )the first heavy bomber to complete a full tour of 25 missions over the German Reich. The Allied bombing campaign involved the USAAF making sorties in broad daylight against the best pilots and fighters the enemy could muster, so to survive a full tour was indeed something incredible (not that the RAF had an easier time at night – British bomber crews were second only to German U-boat crews for their overall percentage of losses).

As well as being famous for its combat record, the Belle was the subject of William Wyler’s renowned 1943 documentary, Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress. The film, purportedly following the plane on its final mission, in reality used footage from numerous missions (one of its cinematographers, First Lieutenant Harold J. Tannenbaum, had been killed in action a month earlier while filming aboard another aircraft). Regardless of editorial sleights of hand (not uncommon in propaganda films), the documentary still accurately portrayed the hardships and dangers faced regularly by the terrifyingly young crews, and both film and plane are now preserved for their important historical value.

Though once a staple of Hollywood, by the late 1980s WW2 films were falling out of favour with audiences as Hollywood turned its attention to more contemporary conflicts like Vietnam. It would take Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in 1998 to bring “the greatest generation” back into full focus, though others did try along the way. One was William Wyler’s daughter Catherine, who was the co-producer of a dramatised version of her father’s vintage film.

Directed by Michael Caton-Jones, for reasons of drama the fictional Memphis Belle was packed with much more incident

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than any of the real plane’s missions to provide a condensed representation of the hazards faced by crews. Although the film captured a nice WW2 atmosphere, many of the predigital visual effects look decidedly dated these days. The photography of the real planes, however, remains spectacular, the five assembled flyable B-17s being the last ever time so many examples were gathered.

Equally spectacular was the BAFTA-nominated score by British composer George Fenton, who, remarkably, came from a background of no formal musical training. Fenton was actually born George Howe, and began his career as an actor in the likes of British soap Emmerdale Farm. He was sometimes cast as a musician and eventually decided to try a career in music for real, progressing from performing to management to composing. He wrote themes for BBC news and current affairs shows before scoring the likes of Shoestring, Bergerac and the exceptional WW1 drama The Monocled Mutineer.

In the 1980s and 1990s though, Fenton was a prolific and frequently acclaimed film composer. He received his big movie break from Richard Attenborough with Gandhi, and went on to score a number of the director’s later films. He also developed close relationships with Ken Loach, Nicholas Hytner, Stephen Frears and Neil Jordan.

While many Fenton scores are intimate and character-driven, the composer proved more than capable of delivering big, kinetic music when necessary (such as the stunning opening credits of We’re No Angels). Memphis Belle was one of those bigger scores, though as a story that explores friendship and fear it still had many quieter, emotion-driven cues.

While making nice use of the tunes Danny Boy and Amazing Grace, the centre of the score is a superb original theme for the Belle and her crew, formed of two distinct but interweaving parts, one noble and the other lyrical. In full or in part it is at times playful (Front Title), sentimental (the lovely guitar of The Steel Lady), rhapsodic (End Credits), tense (Limping Home) and even despairing (With Deep Regret, a stunning sequence where letters from the families of lost airmen are recited over a montage of genuine air combat footage).

It’s most prominent use though is in the film’s signature scene, as the assembled bombers depart for the mission.

This is a wonderfully shot montage of take-offs, each of the five B17s having nose-art repainted several times to give the impression of dozens of planes. As the busy cue progresses Fenton fully captures the tension of getting a plane fully laden with fuel and bombs into the air and the exhilarating momentum of four Pratt & Whitney engines wrenching the planes from the ground, culminating in a grand, majestic sweep as the Belle herself takes to the air.

Varese’s album is excellent, mixing the score with some source tracks, and a vocal version of Danny Boy (though not the film version, which used cast-member and then hot-stuff crooner Harry Connick Jnr.) Regardless of the film’s paucity with the truth, the CD remains a great listen, and works as a lovely musical tribute to the many brave souls who fought and died in the freezing air high above enemy territory. Funnily enough the Sunderland Airshow is next weekend. We’ll be waiting!

Digital Premiere Recordings From The Films Of John Wayne 40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

The Magnificent Seven is a theme so famous that even those with absolutely no interest in film music - or even film – usually recognise it instantly. The late, great Elmer Bernstein, perhaps more than any other composer, shaped and influenced the sound of the modern western as most people know it, and while not all of his scores in that genre achieved the pop culture glory of John Sturges’ 1960 classic, all are equally worthy of attention.

This fabulous pair of albums from the 1980s focused on some of his less well known western music (with the exception of True Grit, which had appeared on record at the time of release). Once again produced by George Korngold and performed by the Utah Symphony Orchestra (see the Varujan Kojian Robin Hood and the Sea Hawk albums featured in an earlier post), this is also in my mind a further instance of two CDs being so inextricably linked that they have to be taken as a set. Varese clearly thought so too, as they later rereleased both albums as a combined single disc (302 066 726 2).

Once again utilising the superior acoustics of the Salt Lake City Symphony Hall, this time composer Elmer Bernstein himself took to the podium, conducting well-considered selections from five of his scores for films starring John Wayne.

Music composed by ELMER BERNSTEIN, conducting The Utah Symphony Orchestra VCD-47236 / VSD-47264

It is true to say that Bernstein did have a western “sound”, just as Wayne had a formulaic approach to his films, and both suited each other well. Typically (but important to say, not always) they followed the ethos of “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it”, both actor and composer often taking the proven path.

Bernstein’s scores would be loaded with rich Americana, vibrant Mexicana and frantic, er, Indiana... Okay, so that last one isn’t actually a thing, but you know what I mean – that distinctive faux-tribal sound used for Indians (as Native Americans were still referred to in those days), all thumping rhythms and warbling woodwind that harked back to the likes of Stagecoach and They Died With Their Boots On in the 1930s.

All of the above and more can be found on these two albums, and no more so than the first score to be presented, The Comancheros. While the main theme does stray very close to that of the aforementioned Magnificent Seven (having followed on just one year later), the action is heroic and brassy, landscapes have a lush, Coplandesque sweep and Bernstein even gets to go full-on Mariachi. The ebullience of the score is infectious, especially in the propulsive cue “Escort”.

More measured was Bernstein’s approach to True Grit, the film that won Wayne his only Oscar as the grumpy, jaded monocular lawman “Rooster” Cogburn. Just as Wayne’s performance varied from his usual out-and-out heroic type, the score too is in some ways iconoclastic, with a reflective theme that is more indicative of the character’s stubborn isolation than any outward courage (though Rooster does show that trait a number of times and is given music to match, never more so than in the cue “Rooster and Runaway”, the score’s powerhouse highlight).

Volume 2 begins with 1976’s The Shootist, Wayne’s final film, and perhaps his most autobiographical. It concerns an aging gunfighter, a shadow of his former self, dying of cancer and unable to escape his reputation. Wayne’s real life melancholy, the result of his failing health (he himself would die of cancer in 1979) permeates his performance, and Bernstein’s score mixes typical Wayne ebullience with more poignant and vulnerable passages. The percussive main theme is absolutely wonderful, painting a broad portrait of a life spent adventurously if not entirely well.

Cahill: United States Marshal was another heroic score, though this is not entirely reflected in the two selections here – Necktie Party sandwiches passages of melancholy and tension between playful instances of the main theme, while Nocturne is a subdued cue notable for its use of piano, violin and flute. Big Jake brings things to a close with some lively action and moments of bittersweet tenderness.

For a considerable time these two albums were the only way to hear some of these scores outside of the films, and even though more complete versions and other compilation recordings are now available, Bernstein’s careful selections still make for a cracking listening experience (something further enhanced by the unsurprisingly stunning sound quality).

So, we say farewell to some brilliant music for an allAmerican icon who liked to play the hero. Well, until tomorrow!

Air Force One

Music composed & conducted by JERRY GOLDSMITH

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Whenever Robert Townson announces that he has new CD Club titles in the works, you can guarantee that at least one person (usually more) will respond with the hope that an expanded Air Force One will be one of them. Perhaps one day it will, but until then we have this, one of Jerry Goldsmith’s greatest action scores in a long career filled with great action scores.

After scoring 1990’s Total Recall, Goldsmith made the decision to avoid action projects that required “more notes than a Bruckner symphony”, favouring instead smaller, characterdriven films. Over the next few years he was mostly good to his word, working on the likes of The Russia House, Not Without My Daughter, Love Field, Six Degrees of Separation and Angie – films that allowed him to delve more deeply into a musical exploration of emotion and relationships.

While this did yield some of his most intimate, sensitive and exquisite work, for some fans it proved an unpopular move.

I was editing the Goldsmith Society magazine, Legend, at the time, and I remember from the letters (it was way before email!) how fan reaction was mixed, with some not taking kindly to Goldsmith’s more subdued efforts and craving the bolder, more kinetic music of which he had proven himself the master so many times before.

Luckily for them the lure of full-on blockbuster films proved too strong for the composer, and soon he was back fully flexing his action muscles with scores like The Shadow, The River Wild, Congo, First Knight and Chain Reaction. In 1997 he composed a score that proved both highly influential and, over a decade after the composer’s death, somewhat controversial.

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Air Force One was an implausible but incredibly fun movie in which Harrison Ford plays a US President who channels John McClane when terrorists take over his highly modified Boeing 747 (look at his face on the cover - he’s not happy!)

Only one year earlier Goldsmith had scored another film about terrorists on a “Jumbo Jet”, Executive Decision, and so for a while seemed to be cornering that particularly niche action market!

With Air Force One, even the hardest to please soundtrack fan found it difficult to level any criticism at Goldsmith’s bombastic score. Its quality was all the more remarkable given that Goldsmith had to write and record it in just two weeks, after Randy Newman’s score was rejected because director Wolfgang Petersen felt it lacked reverence for the material.

Although no stranger to delivering exceptional work under pressure (Chinatown, anyone?), even Jerry Goldsmith had limitations. For Air Force One he only met the exceptionally tight deadline with the help of fellow composer Joel McNeely, who composed additional music based on Goldsmith’s themes. The same thing had been necessary on Star Trek: First Contact, the assistance in that case coming from his own son, composer Joel Goldsmith.

Air Force One’s grand, soaring theme drips with strength, nobility and patriotism, and soon became a shorthand for the sort of music people believed a US President should have. It was clearly an influence on W. G. Snuffy Walden’s magnificent theme for The West Wing, and, getting to the aforementioned controversy, it was used without permission by Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election – a misappropriation that led Richard Kraft and others who knew the composer to point out that Goldsmith would not have endorsed this turn of events.

Countering this theme is a low and threatening motif for the Russian hijackers, a foil to the President’s boldly heroic music. The two ideas balance perfectly and collide frequently, beginning early on in the hijacking sequence - an extended high-octane set piece that thrills with its urgent snares, slicing strings and surging trombones. It is easily one of the greatest individual cues ever composed for a motion picture.

Varese was only able to put out about 35 minutes of score on the soundtrack CD, due to restrictions that were common at the time. Admittedly the music chosen is all gold, but there is still a lot of exceptional material missing.

However, until that day if and when an expanded version emerges we have this – and I for one am glad of it!

K2

Music composed by HANS ZIMMER, orchestrated and conducted by Fiachra Trench

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

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Did you know there’s an asteroid designated “(495253) Hanszimmer” floating between Mars and Jupiter, named by two scientists who are huge fans of the German composer?

This bit of trivia is perhaps as fitting a metaphor as any for the (inter)stellar (yes, I went there) popularity of Hans Zimmer, whose story is one of remarkable ascent (I nearly said “meteoric rise”, but felt I might be pushing the astronomical references too far).

The film’s emphasis on philosophical rumination over action, which audiences seemed to be expecting and desiring, led to it making just $3 million, a significant loss on its budget.

Roddam, perhaps best known for the cult film Quadrophenia, never made another motion picture, instead focusing on publishing and TV work (he was already the creator of northeast classic comedy Auf Weidersehen, Pet and – I kid you not – cooking competition show Masterchef).

I can comment on Zimmer’s music though, and in my view K2 was the composer at his eclectic best - a dynamic score flawlessly mixing orchestra, synths, ethnic instrumentation and electric guitar (played by regular Zimmer collaborator the Pete Haycock). The back of the CD features a lot of credits for the score’s numerous exceptional soloists, including renowned British composer and session musician Richard Harvey.

From pop music through TV themes through small scale indie films, Zimmer quickly rose to become one of Hollywood’s most celebrated composers on the strength of exceptional scores for some exceptional movies. On top of this he won an Oscar and Golden Globe for The Lion King, became head of the Dreamworks film music department, founded a hugely successful music company and mentored a large number of contemporary composers. Oh, and his concerts around the world pack out stadiums in a manner normally reserved for rock and pop stars. Not bad for a man whose rent apparently once relied on the theme from Henry Kelly’s Going for Gold (a prophetic commission if there ever was one!)

Roddam clearly knew his craft though – K2’s external and aerial shots are stunning, and Zimmer gave them suitably expansive music. He wasn’t, however, the project’s first composer. The first score was written by Chaz Jankel, guitarist and keyboardist from the rock band Ian Dury and the Blockheads (and creator of probably the best-titled solo albums ever, Chazanova and Chazablanca). I haven’t heard it personally, but by all accounts Jankel’s score was minimalist, a repeating series of guitar, keyboard and drum loops that lacked any real connection to what was happening on screen.

The power of the score lies in its diversity, with Zimmer introducing and exploring a series of compelling tunes, ideas and sounds which range from propulsive action to ethnic colour to gentle introspection.

Apparently under studio pressure, Roddam then commissioned Hans Zimmer to compose a replacement score, with additional cues by Nick Glennie-Smith, which was used on the film’s first run in Europe. When the film was released in the US six months later, I believe Jankel’s score had been restored – again, I haven’t seen this version so I can’t comment on its effectiveness.

Edited immaculately, the flow and pace is superb and, taken as a whole, the album makes for a fluid and exhilarating listen I have played more times than I could easily count. The second suite doesn’t quite reach the same level of dynamism as the first, being more subdued and less action orientated, but you’ll be hard pushed to find a more interesting, involving and entertaining listen.

On the subject of ascents, welcome to K2, a film now rarely seen. Directed by Franc Roddam (actually from my own home county of Durham despite his Gallic sounding name), this was a 1991 drama about an attempt to climb the titular mountain in the Himalayas, the world’s second highest after Everest. The film starred Michael Biehn and Matt Craven and was based on a stage play by Patrick Meyers, itself loosely based on the true story of Jim Wickwire and Louis Reichardt, the first Americans to reach the summit.

Varese’s soundtrack album features his music alone, and was arranged into extended suites (as was his fabulous score to Pacific Heights, also on Varese, VSD-5286). The Ascent is the longer off the two, at nearly half an hour, while the Descent is roughly half of that.

Mad Max 2 (The Road Warrior) Music composed & conducted by BRIAN MAY

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Hands up if, as a soundtrack fan, you’ve ever had to describe the Australian composer Brian May to someone not familiar with film music as “not the one from Queen”. The fact that the mega-permed guitarist and latter-day badger crusader, who did dabble lightly in film music, shares a name with the Antipodean composer of proper film scores has led to some hilarious misunderstandings on both the internet and in mainstream entertainment magazines from writers who really should know better (or at least fact check).

May, who sadly died in 1997 aged just 62, was an important figure in world film music. He was a key member of the Australian New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s, a global resurgence of popularity in the nation’s cinema thanks to films like Patrick, Mad Max and Gallipoli (all scored by the composer, albeit in the latter instance in the capacity of additional music).

Varese, then still a relatively new and aspiring label, led the way in bringing his work to film music collectors from outside of his native country with LPs of Patrick and Mad Max - early examples of their ongoing mission to promote and support film music from all around the world.

1979’s Mad Max is perhaps now best known for springboarding Mel Gibson into the public eye and being the progenitor of the revitalised Tom Hardy version, Fury Road. The original had Gibson playing the eponymous pursuit cop, driving the highways of a dystopian future “a few years from now” as part of a special unit, the Main Force Patrol (nicknames “Bronzes” for their distinctive badge), tasked with bringing order to an increasingly lawless outback.

While the Mad Max films are generally known for their bleak, post-apocalyptic settings, the first film was actually a straight (if brutal) crime/action/revenge thriller. The nuclear war

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was yet to happen and Max initially leads a normal family life, reflected by May with an idyllic love theme that made prominent use of saxophone, the instrument played by Max’s doomed wife. Out on the roads, however, May channelled Stravinsky and Herrmann with music that is harsh, jagged and belligerent - a raw, adrenaline-pumping explosion of roaring brass, chopping strings and primal rhythms.

When it came to 1982’s sequel Mad Max 2 (called The Road Warrior in the US as at the time the first film was still relatively obscure there), both film and composer this had virtually no comfort or calm to offer, being almost unrelentingly melancholic, pained and violent.

The bombs had now dropped and Max was a lone scavenger, roaming for “guzzoline” in his V8 Ford Falcon GT, the “Pursuit Special”. The outback had been transformed into a scorched, irradiated desert, home only to bands of survivors trying to scrape out an existence, and those keen to prey on them.

The cornerstone of his score was an evocative largo used in full at the beginning and end of the film, strings pulsing with tragedy as distant percussion echoed the futility of the conflict. This theme also appears in part throughout the score to underline Max’s troubles, and evolves into a haunted brass echo as we see one final, atmospheric dolly shot of Max, defiantly alone on the highway.

May maintains an edginess throughout, and even in quiet moments of character interaction uses subtle repeated figures (again derived from the largo), churns and stabs to lend scenes an uneasy feel. Only at the end did a sliver of optimism come through via a brief upbeat passage as the besieged survivors escape due to Max’s selflessness.

The crazed antagonists, a band of motorised marauders led by the steroid-ripped, hockey-masked Lord Humungous (“The Ayatollah of rock and roll-ah!”) are often a threat represented by a disturbing low frequency growl, like an engine idling before a race. When they attack the music becomes cacophonous - a bacchanalia of percussion, howling horns and stabbing trumpets that add an almost ritualistic cruelty to the raping and killing.

For chases, a relentless, urgent rhythm matches the momentum of the various patchwork vehicles that tear and crash their way along the wreck-strewn roads. The closest the score comes to anything even remotely heroic is a little whimsical fanfare used for the antics of Gyro Captain, an oddball aviator Max allies himself with.

The original 1982 Varèse Sarabande album was released on vinyl and presented cues out of film sequence and with altered titles. There are also a handful of sound effects (irony intended, as one of them is the sound of comedy bad guy The Toadie losing his fingers to Feral Kid’s boomerang!) The CD version followed along a few years later (with a photograph of Max on the cover instead of the poster of the LP), and is to date the best way to listen to this essential, important score.

Mad Max 2 also marked May’s goodbye to the franchise, being replaced for the third instalment three years later

by French composer Maurice Jarre, who turned out a stunning, multi-faceted score. All three soundtracks (the latter being the original half-song release, not Tadlow’s expanded version) were reissued in 2017 as a special triple black, grey and sand vinyl (302 067 390 1), limited to 2000 copies.

Frontiers

Music composed by JERRY GOLDSMITH conducting the National Philharmonic Orchestra

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Robert Townson and Jerry Goldsmith recorded numerous classic albums together and, as noted in an earlier post, I was very privileged to be at one day of the sessions for Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire in London back in 1995. It was an amazing experience that I will certainly never forget and for which I am very grateful. However, as a lifelong sci-fi geek and a frequent visitor to the beautiful city of Glasgow (my wife is half-Scottish and we spend one out of every two of our wedding anniversaries there), if I could have been at any other album recording it would have been 1997’s Frontiers.

Growing up in the 1970s, before the advent of home video, I virtually lived in the local cinema, and I was particularly drawn to anything falling into the realms of sci-fi and fantasy. It was there I saw so many films for the first time, including Logan’s Run, Capricorn One, Damnation Alley and Star Trek: The Motion Picture, all of which are represented on Frontiers; I was too young to get into Alien - bah! By the age of eleven, when the latter two movies came out, I was already a huge fan of film music and Jerry Goldsmith in particular, and so for me Frontiers is both an exercise in nostalgia and one of my favourite album forms – the themed compilation.

I’ve always loved compilations. If you’re like me then there are occasions when you want to immerse yourself in a full score, but others when you’d rather be swept along by a variety of themes and short suites. I used to commute a lot, and many are the times a good compilation has preserved my sanity on long, dull drives! It is true that some compilations are obvious or poorly done, but these usually come from non-film music labels trying to tap current trends or cash in on something or other. But when, on the other hand, the right people are selecting the right content with the right performance, for me there’s nothing better.

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And that pretty much sums up Frontiers. Recorded at City Hall, Glasgow on 12th and 13th September 1997, the project allowed Jerry Goldsmith to revisit some choice examples of his work in the science fiction genre. The amount of sci-fi in the composer’s catalogue certainly indicates he had a fondness for the genre, and it can’t be doubted that it inspired some of his best work. In fact, given that Planet of the Apes, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Alien all fall under its umbrella, it could be argued that it elicited his ACTUAL best work.

Frontiers’ line up is eclectic. Aside from the five previously mentioned scores, it also featured music from The Illustrated Man, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Total Recall, Star Trek: First Contact and Star Trek: Voyager, and utilised a mix of concert arrangements and cues as used on screen.

Now 21 years old and with no pieces that aren’t available elsewhere, some collectors newer to film music might think Frontiers is just another compilation album. This would be to do it a severe injustice. It’s easy to forget in these days where complete issues are commonplace that back in the 1990s that there were still many scores as yet unreleased or not digitally mastered. The line-up on Frontiers genuinely excited fans with its rarer inclusions and audiophile quality.

Logan’s Run, for example, offered up two of the score’s highlights - the generous cue The Monument, which showcased the lyrically beautiful main theme amongst passages of pastorale bliss, excited playfulness and sombre mystery, and also the film’s sweeping, optimistic denouement.

Both of these tracks were available on the full soundtrack, but these new digital recordings brought out layers of detail and nuance that, if you’ll pardon the pun (a Logan’s pun?) made them feel renewed.

The Illustrated Man had only previously been available as a bootleg or part of a William Motzing conducted compilation for Germany’s Edel. While the latter was fine enough, the quality of recording again could not compare to the dynamism and depth of this one, and solo Soprano Claire Rutter’s performance of the haunting vocal was mesmerising. Causing most excitement though were two cues from Damnation Alley, the first time any music at all had been available on any album. Their presence here felt for fans like a big cool drink of water after a long, hot walk through a (giant scorpion filled) desert.

Jammed full of classic themes, conducted by the composer himself, performed with gusto by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and richly recorded, this was an album that was – and remains - pure joy. It also contains a fabulous version of what I personally consider to be the greatest individual cue from any film score, ever - “The Enterprise” from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Oh, and a cover by Matthew Peak, as if all of this wasn’t enough.

Anyway, if Robert ever decides the time is right for a Frontiers 2, maybe made up of some cues from Twilight Zone episodic scores, the Satan Bug, Seconds, Planet of the Apes, Outland, Runaway, Explorers, Leviathan and Star Treks V and Nemesis (and with a reprise of “The Enterprise” just for fun)... well, I’m a short drive from Glasgow and can bake excellent cakes that I’d be happy to bring along. Just sayin’...

Battlestar Galactica

Music composed by STU PHILLIPS conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

There is a story, probably well known to most film music fans, about how during one of Stu Phillips’ recording sessions for the pilot of Battlestar Galactica, John Williams was reluctantly present at the behest of the 20th Century Fox legal department. He had been sent to ensure Phillips was not plagiarising any music from Star Wars, something the famously amiable Williams neither wanted nor felt was necessary to do.

As Phillips recalled in 2007, “This was not John’s idea. He was under orders from the studio because of the lawsuit against Universal that was pending at the time. John has always been a good friend and colleague since we first met in 1963.”

Williams naturally left completely satisfied that there was no hint of wrongdoing. Indeed, he had nothing but praise for the music he had just heard, and later included the Galactica theme in the repertoire of the Boston Pops.

Glen A. Larson’s Battlestar Galactica, as a show and a score, was far from the rip-off of Star Wars some accused it of being, visual similarities between the X-Wing and Colonial Viper notwithstanding (the rejected early Viper design was actually reused as the Starfighter in Larson’s Buck Rogers, trivia fans – another series with an exceptional pilot score by Phillips).

The lawsuits and countersuits between Fox and Universal were real enough, but their telling is often, to quote Douglas Adams, “apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate” - and in any case the point was rendered moot when Battlestar Galactica was cancelled due to its high costs for a weekly TV show. It’s certainly true it offered a lot of bang for its star buck (see what I did there?) and it undoubtedly had the success of Star Wars to thank for its existence, but the cult following that built up around the show was entirely down to its own merits.

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An epic story of a far-flung offshoot of the human race fleeing annihilation by the robotic Cylons, Larson drew inspiration from, amongst others, the Biblical Diaspora, Erich von Däniken and, yes, a certain George Lucas movie (but no more than Lucas drew from the likes of Flash Gordon). Within the framework of an action-adventure show Battlestar Galactica examined mature themes like loss, suffering, greed, genocide, selfishness, duty and even the effects of war on children – in fact, the only question it never seemed to ask was why an advanced race of cybernetic warriors built to kill humans would be designed with a single tiny eye that constantly bounces back and forth like a game of Pong. It’s amazing they ever hit anything!

With memorable characters, razor sharp wit and outstanding production values, the effects-heavy Galactica sadly proved financially unsustainable for Universal. An Earthbound spinoff, Galactica 1980, tried to resurrect the show by shifting the tone towards younger viewers, complete with a protoWesley Crusher child genius and flying motorbikes. This, plus a drastically reduced budget, effectively ended the franchise until it was reinterpreted as an acclaimed post-9/11 drama in the noughties, validating the robustness of the central mythology.

Although Galactica spent a quarter of a century in limbo, the score remained highly popular. Its magnificent theme, a combination of heroic fanfare and muscular march, was so iconic that the composer of the reimagined Galactica, Bear McCreary, used it as his on-screen Colonial Anthem, while the 1978 pilot episode’s prologue, “Exploration”, became a piece of on-screen classical piano music, Nomian’s 3rd Sonata.

However, there was little else to connect McCreary’s excellent but mostly avante garde, ethnic tinged scores to Phillip’s originals. Working often under extreme time pressure, his approach was harmonic, symphonic and huge. The pilot score in particular features some of the most impressive and exciting action music to feature in... well, anything, let alone a TV show. Later episodes were hampered by reduced budgets and timescales, leading to the frequent reuse of both visual effects and music cues, but Phillips was wholly and rightly proud of his work. He even released 250 minutes of his original TV scores in 1996 as a four CD promotional “anthology”, albeit in mono.

At the time of the original airdate, a soundtrack LP of selections from the pilot was made from various sessions Phillips conducted with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

This album was then released on CD in 1993 by Edel in Europe (as Kampfstern Galactica). With the promo very rare and the Edel version missing numerous key cues, in 1998 Robert Townson persuaded Phillips to travel with him to Glasgow to re-record the pilot score, releasing a more complete 48-minute album that restored several important missing sequences.

The resulting album succeeded on all levels, offering listeners a pristine and rich sound that impressed even the pickiest audiophiles and plugged many gaps in the track list. Intrada Records later unearthed the original recordings and, with new remastering technology at its disposal and the composer supervising, began to release Galactica’s music in as complete a form as will probably ever exist.

However, the one I play the most remains the Varese version, for the flow of the selections and sheer immersive depth and high energy of the recordings.

Columbus: The Discovery Music composed by CLIFF EIDELMAN conducting the Seattle Symphony Orchestra

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

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Every so often an odd phenomenon occurs where two movies are released at roughly the same time and with remarkably similar content. It’s known as “twin films”, and notable examples include Tombstone/Wyatt Earp, Volcano/Dante’s Peak, Antz/A Bug’s Life, Armageddon/Deep Impact, Capote/ Infamous and The Man with the Iron Heart/Anthropoid.

injecting cash into the project to beef up its credentials (The Godfather author Mario Puzo was brought in to write, while Marlon Brando and Tom Selleck had cameos as Chief Inquisitor Torquemada and the King of Spain respectively), the film made back only $8 million of its $45 million budget and was mauled by critics.

Another story to get this treatment was that of Christopher Columbus, the Genoese explorer credited with discovering America in 1492. When the 500th anniversary of this event rolled around in 1992 it was marked by two rival films – Paramount’s 1492: Conquest of Paradise, starring noted character actor Gérard Depardieu; and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery from Warner Bros., with Georges (credited as George) Corraface, a leading man better known in Europe than Hollywood.

However, the film’s score by Cliff Eidelman was one of the few elements to receive wide praise. The composer, then still in his twenties, had recently burst into the big time with 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, after turning in some very impressive orchestral scores for films like Magdalene and Triumph of the Spirit in the late 1980s (the latter is also on Varese, VSD-5254, and well worth tracking down).

Whereas 1492 director Ridley Scott turned in a gritty, stylish telling of the famed events, Christopher Columbus: The Discovery steered more in the direction of a golden age action-adventure movie, the type that would probably have starred Tyrone Power or Errol Flynn. The production got off to a troubled start when their first choice of director turned out to unavailable – Ridley Scott! Eventually George Pan Cosmatos was contracted, with Timothy Dalton to star. However, Dalton withdrew when Cosmatos was replaced by John Glen, the pair having clashed on the actor’s two James Bond outings, The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill.

These were just some of many problems faced by father and son team Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the producers best known for the Christopher Reeve Superman series. Despite

The score for Columbus fitted the film perfectly - a big, bold symphonic approach reminiscent of the old school epics that composers like Korngold, Rosza and Newman so often made their own. At its core was a grand, resolute and heroic theme that merged splendour-laden brassy fanfares and a rich, melodic sweep. Appearing throughout the score in full or as its component parts, sometimes permeated with a Spanish flavour, Eidelman expertly crafted variations to support all the feelings of triumph, wonder, confidence, doubt and contemplation experienced by the explorer.

A male choir sings glory to the expedition’s benefactors, the Crown and Church, giving the voyage a sense of righteous blessing. The many perils and tribulations of the journey elicited some powerful and urgent action writing, while the New World introduced ethnic colour and texture through exotic instrumentation and rhythms.

From the pomp and grandeur of the Spanish Court to the endless horizons of the Atlantic to the strangeness of the far-flung jungles, Eidelman’s score grips the attention of the listener throughout, and culminates in a truly spectacular and generous denouement. The concept of “twin films” certainly didn’t carry over to 1492’s music which was, by contrast, a frequently subtle new age score composed by Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner composer Vangelis, that was fine enough but a loose fit at times.

Varese’s soundtrack for the competing film remains an important score for a film hardly seen or remembered these days (its failure to sell on VHS and laserdisc led to the unusual instance of it never receiving a US DVD release).

After this CD the relationship between the composer and Varese continued to grow, the label releasing a number of his scores including A Simple Twist of Fate , Now And Then, Free Willy 3: The Rescue, the unused score to The Picture Bride and Untamed Heart.

Eidelman also conducted the albums Romeo and Juliet (a fabulous collection of film and classical music from Shakespeare’s plays), ‎The Alien Trilogy (excellent versions of often complex cues from Goldsmith, Horner and Goldenthal) and the compilation Blood & Thunder, with a wonderfully eclectic mix of epic cues including Jerry Goldsmith’s Raisuli Attacks from The Wind and the Lion; a breathtaking example of the composer’s action writing probably quite literally for the trumpets!

The Avengers

Music composed by LAURIE JOHNSON conducting the London Studio Orchestra

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

One thing the UK has never been short of is collections of music by the famed composer Laurie Johnson on CD, so there is therefore a certain irony to the fact that my favourite collection of his music, and also I think the very best, is an American release - John Steed would not approve!

Johnson is most often associated with music for television, and has a gift for catchy tunes (and I use present tense here because, wonderfully, Mr Johnson is still with us at 91). His themes for programmes like Animal Magic and This Is Your Life are iconic and still instantly recognisable. He is perhaps best known though for action/adventure shows like The Avengers, The New Avengers, Jason King and The Professionals, carving himself a niche in the 1960s and 1970s as the go-to guy for such work. He also produced copious amounts of library music, some of which, amusingly, can be still be heard in animated cartoons like Spongebob Squarepants.

Co-produced by the great and still much missed Christopher Palmer (whose involvement was a sign of quality on any project), the album begins with some selections from The Avengers and The New Avengers.

The Avengers theme had replaced a jazz-influenced intro

by John Dankworth, adopting a more orchestral but still very upbeat approach. The dynamic opening fanfare completely suits the grandiose, flamboyant central character of John Steed (Patrick McNee), while the silky theme that follows, primarily on strings and trumpet, fairly bounces along. It’s a TV theme you could literally dance to. The two episodic tracks

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are a lovely reminder that Johnson was as attentive to the emotions of the show as to its action, with the theme from Pandora as hauntingly beautiful as any you are ever likely to hear.

When Gareth Hunt as Mike Gambit and Joanna Lumley as Purdey joined Steed in 1976 for The New Avengers, the tone of the show shifted to match the harder, more cynical edge of the decade. Less light-hearted than its 1960s forebear, Johnson connected the two shows by retaining the opening fanfare before switching to militaristic drums and electric guitars and then into a much more aggressive, surging, brass dominated theme.

The rest of the CD is taken up with the aforementioned four film scores. Dr Strangelove gets a single track, The Bomb Run, its building drumbeat and echoing brass mingling with traditional tune When Johnny Comes Marching Home which, in a stroke of genius, manages to feel both satirical and portentous all at once via a harmonica and almost groaning male voices. It’s a tune also used by greats such as Alfred Newman, Michael Kamen, Jerry Goldsmith and others, but this remains my favourite.

A more comprehensive selection is included from First Men in the Moon, of which I’ve already spoken. Johnson’s music is spectacularly weighty and powerful, and very much in the style of his close friend Bernard Herrmann in its slurring brass and woodwind cells.

Johnson had been the composer’s assistant on previous Harryhausen movies, and took the reins when Herrmann passed this project up (because, rumour has it, he felt Schneer didn’t pay enough). The music for the Moon’s indigenous, insect-like Selenites is a true highlight, shrill and relentless, their pursuit of the Victorian astronauts almost scored like a fox hunt. It still gives me goosebumps!

Hedda is a change of pace, and also has a hint of Herrmann about it, albeit Herrmann’s more thoughtful aspect. Johnson’s music is sensitive to the fact that the film is based on a play, matching the slower pace dictated by extended sections of dialogue while supporting the sombre, yearning tone of the story. Captain Kronos ends the album in exciting form, with a determined, galloping theme and agitated fight music as soldier Horst Janson takes on vampires feasting on the denizens of an ill-fated village.

Of particular note is the sound, which remains a benchmark for audiophiles. It would be hard to better this as a sampler of Johnson’s work, with perhaps the exception of some tracks from The Belstone Fox. It really is a must have, if you can find a copy. But not mine. It’s my precious...

And The Band Played On Music composed & conducted by CARTER BURWELL

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

It’s hard now to imagine that just a few short years ago AIDS was known by some as the “Gay Cancer”. Hard to imagine that innocent sufferers were cruelly shunned; that instead of receiving compassion and support they were unfairly persecuted, feared and stigmatised. It’s hard to imagine the ignorance of the many people who believed the rumours and hearsay - that the illness could be spread by handshakes, or toilet seats, or sneezes, or by just sitting near a sufferer on a bus. Worse, it’s hard to imagine that there was a time when none of this seemed to trouble governments or corporations, who held back research, funding and progress because of vested interests, large egos, prejudice and tangled bureaucracy while thousands suffered and died.

It still makes me angry, and so too does the film And The Band Played On. Roger Spottiswoode’s 1993 television docudrama was based on the 1987 non-fiction book by Randy Shilts.

Matthew Modine played real life American epidemiologist Don Francis, who in 1981 correlated a rise in unexplained deaths among gay men in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco and set about finding the cause. Francis met obstacles at every turn, from limited resources to political interference and even the gay community itself, who objected to his suggestions for preventing the spread as an infringement on their lifestyles.

Twenty-six years on the film still shocks. Did hospitals really turn away sufferers? Was blood screening considered an unacceptable expense? Were lives really less important than money, individual reputations and changing the status quo?

The film asks how such short-sightedness and injustice could ever be allowed to happen, but can provide no answers except the implication that some people lack humanity, and they’re often the ones who end up in charge of important things.

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The film was shown globally to great acclaim, but was then overshadowed when a high-profile AIDS project was released in cinemas soon after, Jonathan Demme’s Oscar-winning Philadelphia. A quarter of a century on, it is Demme’s film that most people remember, though And The Band Played On remains, in my view anyway, the more powerful and relevant of the two.

Critics agreed – the film has a rare 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is more remarkable given its troubled production. Spottiswoode was actually the third director attached, both Joel Schumacher and Richard Pearce having already left the project under cloudy circumstances.

Spottiswoode too claimed he was fired, citing disagreements over the handling of the sensitive subject - something HBO long denied.

Certainly by the time Carter Burwell was contracted to compose the score, Spottiswoode was unavailable. In Burwell’s own words “I spoke with Roger on the phone once, but we’ve never met. I’d say we were in agreement about the tone of the music - that it should be unadorned with a simple integrity. I dealt mostly with the producers, Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury, who worked very hard to complete a film that would satisfy HBO without messing up Roger’s original concept. I don’t recall ever getting much in the way of creative notes from anyone. Which was fine with me.”

Because they probably knew the score was in safe hands.

Carter Burwell is one of the most original, innovative, consistently excellent voices in film music. It’s safe to say he is best known for his work with the Coen brothers, having scored to date fifteen of their films, but Burwell has also composed for numerous more “mainstream” films, including Doc

Hollywood, Rob Roy, Conspiracy Theory, Gods and Monsters and Twilight, sometimes using the money earned to fund his own projects. In recent years he has received two Oscar nominations, for 2015’s Carol and 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. I suspect they’ll be far from the last.

For And The Band Played On, Burwell’s approach was low key. Using a restricted, almost chamber-like palette of instruments that emphasised strings, harp, percussion and John Moses on clarinet, the music is gentle and thoughtful, as befits a slow-burning film loaded with expository dialogue. The score is consistently sad, though never despairing, consistent with Francis’ quiet determination to succeed and his resilience to the obstacles he faced.

There is hope here, but you need to dig deep. A repeating cell of three notes gives the score forward momentum, the idea being, again in the composer’s own words, “The music tries to suggest a wheel turning tragically, without beginning or end”.

In hindsight the composer has been self-effacing of And The Band Played On, saying on his website “This was one of my first efforts at orchestrating and conducting my own compositions, and today it sounds a bit thin and a bit stiff to me, but I still very much like the themes. Right after this recording I decided to study conducting at Julliard so I could at least wave my arms more convincingly.”

I can’t contradict the assessment of the composer himself of course, but to me this is an important and beautiful score that handles a difficult subject with empathy, dignity and sensitivity where others may have been tempted to be overly dramatic or maudlin.

Jacob’s Ladder

Music composed & conducted by MAURICE JARRE

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Maurice Jarre was a composer never afraid to experiment. If there was a sound or instrument he never got around to trying, I certainly can’t think of it. Of course, he could be the absolute master of melody, able to conjure up gorgeous tunes and use a traditional orchestra like the greatest classical masters of Vienna, Paris and Saint Petersburg. But then he could produce music like Jacob’s Ladder; inventive, courageous and cerebral. For me he was to Europe what Jerry Goldsmith was to American film music, in that while both wrote scores for a living, both also hugely extended the boundaries of their vocation as an art form.

Case in point, this psychological horror film directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Tim Robbins as Jacob, a Vietnam veteran who experiences increasingly disturbing, fragmented visions.

Are the twisted creatures that stalk him real, or in his mind? Is he descending into madness, being punished by supernatural forces, or the victim of an illicit military drugs test while “in country”?

Writer Bruce Joel Rubin (Brainstorm, Ghost) was inspired by reports of US Army tests of hallucinogens in Vietnam, Dante’s Inferno, the Tibetan Book of the Dead (he spent two years living in a Tibetan monastery), the paintings of Francis Bacon, the work of H.R. Giger, and numerous other sources.

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Though only moderately successful upon release in 1990, the film has since gained cult status and was highly influential on several later projects. Both its look and its score played a big part in the final form of Konami’s Japanese horror video game series Silent Hill, while TV director Kim Manners revealed in an interview that he prepared for the classic The X-Files episode “Grotesque” by listening to the soundtrack from Jacob’s Ladder. A remake of the film is currently in production too, for a planned 2019 release.

Jacob’s Ladder is indeed a benchmark on how to unsettle viewers. The monsters that haunt Jacob were a mix of thalidomide victims (children born of mothers given a morning sickness drug that caused severe deformities) and actors filmed shaking their heads at four frames per second, thus causing a violent, jagged blurring when played back at 24fps.

Test screenings overwhelmed and nauseated viewers, leading to extensive cuts to excise the most disturbing imagery.

To support this dark tapestry of Vietnam flashbacks, the mundane real world and Jacob’s episodes of nightmarish surrealism, Lyne once again turned to Maurice Jarre, with whom he had worked on 1987’s Fatal Attraction. Jarre merged numerous styles that remarkably managed to cohere, but simultaneously clash and perturb.

Building on his orchestral core, he employed Gloria Cheng on piano, who picks out Jacob’s lonely sadness through a delicate recurring theme, and a sizable electronic ensemble made up of Michael Boddicker, Judd Miller, Michael Fisher, Nyle Steiner, Ralph Grierson and Rick Marvin, who give the score the grating, industrial edge that was so influential on the Silent Hill game music.

Kazu Matsui, who had worked on John Williams’ Empire of the Sun and Jarre’s own Shogun, performed the shakuhachi, while for vocals he used California-based allfemale choral ensemble Kitka, who specialise in Eastern European vocal traditions, and soloists Jubilant Sykes, Kari Windingstad and L. Shankar, who also played a custom ten-string double violin.

Jarre merges these disparate elements so expertly it actually becomes hard to tell where they begin and end, but, amazingly, it never becomes so cacophonous or atonal that it ceases to be music.

Because some cues in the film are slight, the album was mixed into five suites that work as a challenging, inventive, fascinating audioscape, and also include music not featured in the final cut of the film. The album ends as the film does with Al Jolson’s Sonny Boy – something that, for all the strange and unusual sounds Jarre employs, is what actually tips the soundtrack completely into the realms of the surreal.

Jacob’s Ladder is a difficult, genius, intriguing masterpiece, and a brave soundtrack for Varese to release - though of course that is often case for them. I don’t know how well it sold, but I do believe it is a true work of art, and pushed the boundaries of what a score could be just a little bit further.

SeaQuest DSV

Music composed & conducted by JOHN DEBNEY

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

It may be because my entire life has been spent on or near the coast, but I’ve always enjoyed the differing ways composers find to give the impression of the listener being on or under water. The effects and instrumentation used to depict the latter particularly intrigues and satisfies me, from John Williams’ Jaws and Jaws 2 through Jerry Goldsmith’s Leviathan and Legend, James Newton Howard’s Waterworld and Elliot Goldenthal’s Sphere (amongst many others).

To this list must be added John Debney’s SeaQuest DSV, which ranks amongst the finest TV music ever composed.

While people have been rightly wowed by Debney’s recent musical contributions to Seth McFarlane’s hit show The Orville (more or less alternating episodes with Joel McNeely), those of us of a certain age know he already has plenty of form for providing excellent scores to weekly science fiction television.

After dabbles with Star Trek Deep Space Nine (two episodes) and Star Trek The Next Generation (one), Debney scored season one of Rockne S. O’Bannon’s SeaQuest DSV, as well as composing it’s celebrated theme. Debuting in 1993, the show was set in the future year of 2018 (can you imagine!?), where dwindling resources have led humanity to colonise the oceans as land resources run short. Policing this brave blue world (*ahem*) was the United Earth Oceans (UEO), a combined military and scientific organisation with as its flagship a superadvanced submarine, the SeaQuest DSV (Deep Submergence Vessel).

Half undersea western (one episode literally was), half watery Star Trek, SeaQuest was a clever and well written show, lent gravitas by Jaws star Roy Scheider as Captain Nathan Bridger.

Scheider, however, quit after season 2 (save a couple of contractually obligated appearances) when the hard science

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and environmental messages which drew him to the project were diluted by increasingly action-orientated scripts. By season 3 it had evolved into a pure adventure show, SeaQuest 2032, with Michael Ironside as no-nonsense Captain Oliver Hudson.

Steven Spielberg executive produced the first two seasons, keen to tap the educational potential of a show set under the seas. Brief pieces on oceanic conservation were included over the closing credits, presented by oceanographer and Titanic wreck discoverer Dr. Robert Ballard, the show’s scientific advisor. In season 2 the cast took over this job, and for season 3 it was abandoned altogether.

SeaQuest broke new ground in visual effects as first show to entirely use CGI, employing daisy-chained Commodore Amigas running Lightwave. It paved the way for the more complicated VFX of Babylon 5, before advances in computing made CGI much quicker, cheaper and more realistic.

Despite its serious message, enviable cast and high production values, SeaQuest arrived at a time when there was a glut of TV sci-fi on the back of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and so it had a lot of competition for audiences.

John Debney’s Emmy-winning theme tune immediately sets the tone of the show - bold, optimistic, adventurous and tuneful, it swirls us beneath the rolling ocean before marching us through an exciting montage of scenes from the show under the credits. In 1995 Varese Sarabande released a short but excellent CD featuring selections from three episodes, framed by the theme as used in the opening and closing credits. The three episodes all had very different themes and tones, and so were a good showcase for the diversity Debney brought to the show.

First we had the pilot,“To Be or Not to Be” - an action episode, as pilots tend to be as they try to hook audience interest. Debney delivered some weighty, powerful combat music as the SeaQuest faces off a rogue submarine commanded by its disgraced former captain. The title theme featured prominently in full and in part - sometimes under gentle layers of sound as the vessel glides beneath the waves, at others over a relentless martial rhythm as it prepared for battle or hunted its adversary. The threat of the enemy sub was rendered through snarling trombones and chopping strings.

“Knight of Shadows” was an unusual episode in that it was a purely supernatural story with no scientific explanation, as restless ghosts haunt the wreck of a sunken liner discovered by the SeaQuest. Debney’s score was suitably spooky, with an eerie waltz for the rotting opulence of the lost vessel. “Such Great Patience” was, by contrast, a hard sci-fi episode, as the SeaQuest finds a million year old alien spaceship, giving Debney the opportunity to write music that was mysterious and wondrous.

At just 30 minutes this was merely a sampler of the exceptional scores written for the groundbreaking show, albeit making a wholly superb listen. Many have wished for a more comprehensive release at some point - perhaps a box set, as has happened with shows like the various Star Treks, The X-Files and even Buffy The Vampire Slayer.

Whether this will ever happen or not is, of course, down to two things – the availability of the music, and whether the proposition would be commercially viable. If those stars ever align, I’m sure Varese will deliver the goods. In the meantime SeaQuest DSV serves as a reminder that some of the best film music is... well, for TV.

Army of Darkness

Music composed by JOSEPH LODUCA “March of the Dead” composed by DANNY ELFMAN

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

I once read a bit of online trivia, the accuracy of which I cannot verify, claiming that the first batch of posters produced for Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness credited the music to Joseph DoLuca instead of LoDuca, due to the marketing people not being familiar with his name. Was this true? Could such a typographic indignity ever happen to Jerry Goldsmyth or John Will.I.am? We’ll never know, but what I do know is that Joseph LoDuca is a name no film music fan would ever typo.

A hugely prolific composer working largely in TV, LoDuca found his way into scoring via classical training from a background in rock and jazz. Although he had proven his versatility time and again, he is often associated with projects that feature fantasy heroes in historic settings, such as Xena, Hercules, The Librarian and Spartacus. This 1992 film certainly falls into that category too.

Army of Darkness was the third movie in The Evil Dead series, continuing the misadventures of hapless S-Mart employee Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell). Writer/Director Sam Raimi had burst onto the scene with his virtually budget-free but visually inventive horror film The Evil Dead in 1981, which quickly gained notoriety for its graphic content (notably, the tree rape scene) and genuine atmosphere of terror.

Here in the UK it was banned as a “video nasty” for nearly a decade. However, the film was championed by American author Stephen King, and it made a lot of money in comparison to its budget. After his follow-up movie, surreal black comedy Crimewave, failed to do much business (due mostly to a limited release), Raimi thus returned to The Evil Dead in 1987 with a sequel - though it was actually more of a remake.

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Although Evil Dead 2 ended by setting up another movie, it was in fact the success of Raimi’s 1990 superhero horror film Darkman that persuaded Universal Studios to give him the green light to directly continue Ash’s fight against the malevolent “Deadites”.

For the third instalment Raimi and Campbell were determined to “get out of the cabin”. Thus Ash is catapulted to 1300AD (the original title was intended to be The Medieval Dead), and must work with a band of self-interested knights to repel an entire army of Deadites, led by an evil copy of himself. As a further bit of trivia, The Evil Dead trilogy was the first that could be edited together as one continuous story without any time jump between episodes, and you can find it on YouTube as one fan actually did this.

Filming took place in California in 1991, an arduous shoot due to the large number of nights it entailed. The film played for comedy much more than the first two, with broad visual gags, eminently quotable dialogue (“This is my boom stick!”) and even Three Stooges routines. The effects reached new levels too, with the Deadite forces (who humourously grumble about being resurrected) created through a mix of prosthetics, animatronics and even stop-motion animation.

The film can be found in several cuts. The original release had a “happy” ending, with Ash getting home and the girl, after studio execs panicked and demanded changes that held back release for a year. A later home version restored the original ending, where magic intended to return Ash to his own time goes wrong and he sleeps through a nuclear war (thus setting up a planned post-apocalyptic sequel, which Raimi was still touting as recently as 2013). The latter cut is regarded as the definitive one, and the film is now regarded as a cult classic.

Some reviews at the time however focused on the single contribution of Danny Elfman (composer of Darkman).

Elfman’s cue, the “March of the Dead”, is superb it must be said, pounding and clanging along as the army of Deadites relentlessly advance on the human castle, but its inclusion feels akin to that of the Battle in the Air track by William Walton that was shoehorned into Ron Goodwin’s Battle of Britain score as an exercise in prestige. Although welcome, March of the Dead is not the star of the show here and LoDuca never quotes it, eschewing its seriousness for a more knowing approach that better suited tone of the film – it even opens with a lovely, witty choral homage to the theme from Cape Fear, the remake of which had recently used Herrmann’s score as adapted by Elmer Bernstein.

The composer injects some nice shock effects, and the choir is put to great effect providing moments of revulsion or mysticism, but like the film the composer never really goes down a full-on horror route. The bad guys are mostly just too comical. For example the scene where Ash is attacked by miniature versions of himself (including with a fork, to the cry of “Ramming speed!”) is pure slapstick.

Ash, all bluster and machismo, is scored heroically, but with a tongue firmly in cheek. He is, after all, barely competent and his ego far outstrips his abilities. His jaunty ride out to find the Necronomicon wouldn’t be out of place in a western, while the Deathcoaster, a weapon made from Sam Raimi’s 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 (a running gag he features in most of his movies), is given a propulsive, determined motif which later represents the knights’ triumph (the fabulously titled “Manly Men”).

Army of Darkness is just a joyful listen from start to finish, and an album I play often. Such a great cover too!

The London Sessions

Music composed and conducted by GEORGES DELERUE

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

“The Mozart of cinema.” That’s how French newspaper Le Figaro described Georges Delerue, one of the most important figures in European (and indeed all) film music. So beloved was he in his native France that the composer was awarded the title Commander of Arts and Letters, one of the nation’s highest honours.

Delerue was no stranger to accolades. He earned an Academy Award for A Little Romance (1979) and was nominated for four more (Anne of the Thousand Days in 1969, The Day of the Dolphin in 1973, Julia in 1977 and Agnes of God in 1985).

He was the first composer to win three successive César Awards (1979, 1980, 1981, of seven in total), in addition to two ASCAP Awards, two BAFTA nominations, three Golden Globe nominations and many other recognitions of his exceptional talent. When the composer sadly died aged 67 in 1992, suffering a heart attack shortly after recording the last cue for the score to Rich in Love, he left behind over 350 film soundtracks, television projects and documentaries, as well as many works for concert.

Georges Delerue seemed to somehow write both from his intellect and his heart simultaneously - a technical master with the sensitive soul of a poet. Le Figaro’s analogy was right – like Mozart, his music was never too much or not enough. It was always exactly right.

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Varèse Sarabande was one of Delerue’s greatest champions, releasing as many of his scores as it could and playing a major role in introducing his work to a whole new generation of aficionados, especially on the US side of the Atlantic.

Nothing, however, could top The London Sessions, which were recorded in the May of 1989 at Abbey Road Studios with Delerue conducting three volumes of carefully selected suites and themes. It would be unthinkable for this not to make any celebration of the label’s achievements.

The London Sessions was a landmark project, representing nearly forty of his scores (Volume 2 has a suite from the films of Francois Truffaut that fits ten alone into twelve minutes).

To try and reference everything included on it would take an essay. Suffice to say, the music runs the full gamut of Delerue’s range, from joy to heartbreak, warmth to iciness, lyricism to dissonance, delicacy to power - always involving, always affecting. I defy anybody not to be moved by the sudden sweep of strings over the choir of Agnes of God, or not be haunted by the theme from Salvador, or not to want to whistle along to the theme from A Little Sex (especially when the flute carries it).

It’s also worth noting that for a long time these volumes were the only way to (legitimately) hear some of Delerue’s unreleased music, most famously his Barber-inspired Platoon (Oliver Stone instead just used the original) and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Both have since been released in full, but back in the day the latter suite stopped some fans in their tracks, used to James Horner’s replacement score after the studio ordered a recut to lighten the tone of the film.

Delerue’s suite is simply one of the greatest listening experiences a film music fan can have in their collection – from the thrusting, brooding power of the opening to the beautiful, innocent flute melody; the hypnotic chiming of the Middle Eastern-styled middle section; the portentous low strings and woodwinds; the final huge sweep of the main melody... It’s all just perfect.

The London Sessions showcased Delerue’s inherent artistry - classical in style, nuanced in emotion and precise in execution. Here was a composer who could evoke more feeling with a flute and a harp than some can with a 100 piece orchestra. Add this three superb cover paintings by the legendary Robert Peak and you have an absolutely essential but now quite rare set.

Varese did reissue parts of the London Sessions, plus suites from some of his later scores, on a double CD called Great Composers: Georges Delerue. If you don’t have it, this is a golden chance to add this essential music to your collection at an excellent price, so my wholehearted recommendation would be to buy the London Sessions while you can and then vacuum up as many of Delerue’s original score CDs as possible. Your ears and your heart will be eternally grateful.

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles 40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Music composed by LAURENCE ROSENTHAL & JOEL McNEELY VSD-5381 / VSD-5391 / VSD-5401 / VSD-5421

These days, thanks to advances in filmmaking technology and creators such as HBO, Netflix and Amazon, we’re used to TV shows that are made with the sort of budgets, talent and production values once only associated with cinema productions. In the early 1990s, however, that kind of investment of time and cash on a TV show was rare. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles was one of the exceptions.

appropriate timeframe far more quickly than with traditional glass-painting techniques. In addition, much as The Time Tunnel had done decades earlier, the show integrated footage from existing films to give stories a cost-effective, readymade supply of epic set pieces (one episode, “Palestine, October 1917”, even had director Simon Wincer using footage from his own 1987 movie The Lighthorsemen).

“Young Indy”, as it was colloquially known, remains one of the most ambitious TV shows ever made. Running from 1992 to 1993 across 28 episodes (with four TV movies added a couple of years later), it was inspired by the popularity of the prologue sequence from 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (though without original actor River Phoenix, who turned down the chance to reprise the young Indiana Jones role). The show followed Indy in two stages of his early life – as a young boy, played by Corey Carrier, and in his late teens, played by Sean Patrick Flanery (often concerning his experiences in WW1).

Each episode was presented in flashback, as told by a 93-year old Indy, played by actor George Hall and modelled on director John Ford (complete with eye patch).

The show received critical acclaim and attracted the cream of acting and technical talent, winning 11 Emmy Awards of 26 nominations. Even Harrison Ford was persuaded to return for one episode, The Mystery of the Blues, playing Indy aged 50.

However, despite the care and money that went into the show its ratings were low, possibly because audiences expected the show to be as exciting as his cinema outings.

While the show was a mixture of action, adventure and romance, creator George Lucas also wanted it to have strong historical and educational values. Filmed in 35 countries (albeit in 16mm to reduce costs), Young Indy often felt like a travelogue as it lovingly presented overseas cultures while contriving ways for Indy to witness many historical events and encounter numerous famous figures including Lawrence of Arabia, Tolstoy, Picasso, Churchill, Roosevelt, Hemingway, Patton, Mata Hari, Dvorak and Pancho Villa.

Young Indy was the first TV project to use digital matte paintings, allowing the producers to show locations in an

Also of the highest quality was the show’s music. It was decided that John Williams’ famous theme would be eschewed in favour of a new signature by veteran composer and double Oscar nominee Laurence Rosenthal. Maintaining some structural similarities to Williams’ piece, Rosenthal composed a distinctly vibrant and youthful theme with an urgent, energetic bridge. It is a reflection of the theme’s strength that it is, to many Indy fans, as much a part of the character as the Raiders March.

Rosenthal and composer Joel McNeely produced the lion’s share of episodic scores between them, both becoming deserving Emmy winners. Two episodes were also handled by Frédéric Talgorn, and one by Curt Sobel.

At the time of the show Varese Sarabande took the unusual step of releasing not one or two but four CDs of music, featuring work by Rosenthal and McNeely exclusively.

Each volume was packed with almost as much music as the CD format could carry, and was graced with a beautiful cover painting by illustrator Matthew Peak.

To describe each episodic score in detail would take much more room than I’m willing to give myself here, except to say that the pair take the listener through a whole gamut of styles and emotions – there is music for the brutality and tragedy of war, for hi-octane action, broad comedy, gentle romance and much, much more.

Both composers also embraced a wide range of ethnic styles, working in flavours of everywhere from Catalonia to Dublin, China to Africa. Two of the most celebrated episodes focused on Indy’s love and jazz and blues, Joel McNeely delivering a pair of scores (which take up most of Volume 3) that feature superb solo performances, adaptations of existing music and clever incorporation of popular period styles like swing into the dramatic underscore. In fact, source cues are cleverly worked in throughout the series, one standout example in my mind being Rosenthal’s highly comical weaving of RimskyKorsakov’s Scheherazade into his “Barcelona, April 1917” score as Indy gets involved in a farcical spy adventure with the famed performance by the Ballets Russes as a backdrop.

Young Indiana Jones is music of the highest order, wellperformed by the Munich Symphony Orchestra, with each episode described by its respective composer in the liner notes. These are essential releases, and worth finding.

Demolition Man

Music composed and conducted by ELLIOT GOLDENTHAL

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

When Demolition Man was released in 1993, it stood out from the typical violent action fare of the time in several ways. While still highly satisfying on the guns ’n’ gore front, it also had a great high concept, a fresh look, decent acting, smart dialogue and a wry wit. Additionally, of course, it had a world-class score from one of music’s finest composers during an all-toobrief but incredibly rich streak of Hollywood film work.

The film follows LA cop John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone), cryogenically imprisoned in 1996 after being framed for a massacre and later released into a utopian near future to hunt similarly thawed psychopathic criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes). His new world of “San Angeles” in 2032 is one where crime is completely unknown, cursing is fined instantly and even the mildest bodily contact is considered a huge social infringement. Oh, and fast food chains have evolved into prestigious gourmet restaurants. With society now meek, shallow and presumably cholesterol-filled, people have forgotten how to deal with confrontation (even cops are told merely to use a firm tone of voice). Naturally, the combined presence of Spartan and Phoenix leads to havoc.

Demolition Man is often played for laughs – something not uncommon in action movies per se, but unlike most others its humour came not from glib one-liners uttered by the hero but from the fact that Spartan was a complete fish out of water; a relic of an obsolete world who literally can’t even wipe his own butt without resorting to uncouth behaviour. We laughed at him as well as with him, and Stallone was admirably game. We rooted for John Spartan in a way we couldn’t for the deadpan Judge Dredd two years later.

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It’s a great idea, executed beautifully. San Angeles is the polar opposite of the dystopian cities shown in films like Blade Runner - an immaculate, sanitised world of green lawns and tiny, silent electric cars (in contrast to the roaring muscle cars of most action heroes), where intimate relations are conducted through machines and toilets use three sea shells instead of paper (a quarter of a century on, I still want to know how that particular technology works!)

The film gave Sandra Bullock her Hollywood breakthrough as quirky, adorably naive cop Lenina Huxley (see what they did there?). It also marked the first big-budget action movie score of Elliot Goldenthal, a former student of Aaron Copland and John Corigliano sometimes called “the thinking man’s composer” for his inventive, experimental and unconventional approach to composition.

Goldenthal had a busy 1990s and early 2000s, with film music fans hailing his exceptional and highly original scores for films like Alien 3, Batman Forever, Sphere and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (my personal favourite), culminating in an Academy Award and Golden Globe in 2002 for the film Frida, directed by his long-time partner Julie Taymor.

Some find Goldenthal’s music inaccessible, railing from his frequent unabashed aggression and atonality. I’m not one of them. There are times when you want to listen to pretty tunes, and there are times when you want to be challenged.

Goldenthal is often firmly in the latter camp, but his scores are thoroughly developed, highly intellectual and finely crafted works, far from the unstructured cacophonies some accuse them of being (and, of course, he HAS also gifted us with some really pretty tunes!)

Goldenthal clearly saw that Demolition Man was deliberately over the top, and scored it as such. It opens, for example, mock-portentously with a version of the Dies Irae, which he later makes into a waltz in what could be a sly (pardon the pun) acknowledgement of the highly choreographed nature of the fights and gunplay. Even as the film ends, the composer can’t resist one final swipe against convention by parodying the sweeping romantic cues that often end action movies as the hero “gets the girl” (the knowingly titled “Silver Screen Kiss”).

Dominated by action, much of his music is exhilaratingly brutal and violent, with metallic percussion clanking and banging seemingly (but far from) randomly to enhance the sense of chaos. Goldenthal sometimes cleverly uses the (then contemporary) sounds of the 1990s, like techno rhythms and scratch-mixing, as “retro” sounds within the context of the future setting. However, there are some wonderfully subtle and tense moments, notably the attempt by the SAPD to apprehend Phoenix after he commits a number of “MDKs” (Murder-Death-Kills), the horror of the ineffectual police made tangible with brass stabs as strings, harp and woodwind tremble and churn a subtle variation on the Machine Waltz.

As a score to a Stallone film Demolition Man sometimes slips through the cracks, as fans heap praise (rightly of course) on Jerry Goldsmith’s music for the Rambo movies, Bill Conti’s Rocky scores or Alan Silvestri’s Judge Dredd.

All of these examples have very strong thematic and melodic components to latch onto, something Demolition Man can’t – and doesn’t try to - compete with. They are there, but buried deep. If you’re willing to do some digging though, this is a wonderful listen with a depth few action scores ever reach.

Stripes

Music composed and conducted by ELMER BERNSTEIN

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Although highly adaptable, Bernstein was especially associated with certain genres, and we’ve already looked at westerns via his Utah John Wayne recordings and science fiction with Spacehunter. With this album, we look at another genre he became well known for in the late 1970s and through the 1980s – the comedy.

Beginning with 1978’s Animal House, over the next few years Bernstein would compose music for Meatballs, Airplane! (which was also used in its sequel, as adapted by Richard Hazard), Stripes, Trading Places, Ghostbusters, Spies Like Us and !Three Amigos! (complete with odd punctuation!)

His chosen style was to score the films as dramas, something suggested to him by John Landis for the aforementioned 1978 frat-house movie. It was a stroke of genius that excited Bernstein – to craft serious music that worked as counterpoint to the ridiculous things happening on screen, fashioning scores that actually amplified the laughs through immaculate timing and pin-sharp parody. His approach was highly influential and for a while it almost became the de rigueur, with Ira Newborn in particular also producing some great “serious” scores for very silly films (notably The Naked Gun trilogy and Dragnet).

Elmer Bernstein clearly enjoyed comedy projects, occasionally pointing out with satisfaction that his scores accompanied the highest-grossing films for three years running. However, by 1989’s Ghostbusters 2 the composer had decided to direct his energies elsewhere, though he did dabble with comedy occasionally in the 1990s with the likes of Oscar, Canadian Bacon (with son Peter), Roommates and Wild, Wild West, all eliciting fabulous scores, though none of the films could be regarded as big successes.

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For quite a while I was considering putting Spies Like Us in this slot, an early release (VCD-47246) later reissued on Varese Encore (VCL 1215 1163). It’s a stunning, thrilling score with one of the most dynamic opening titles in Bernstein’s oeuvre, and well worth getting.

In the end, though, I settled for 1981’s Stripes, which as a score I love just as much, but as a film resonates with me more because it reminds me of my early years when I was becoming old enough (13!) to start getting into the cinema to see grownup movies with horror in them and, well, y’know, naughty stuff.

Stripes was one of my first, and it was indeed naughty. I mean topless mud-wrestling naughty... Popping out of a bedside trunk with a female MP and declaring “that was interesting” naughty... But despite these scenes and other sexual references, Stripes was actually far from just another “getting laid” comedy.

Originally intended as a vehicle for stoner duo Cheech and Chong, director Ivan Reitman reworked his script for Bill Murray and Harold Ramis when the initial pair insisted on complete creative control. It turned out to be the best thing that could have happened. The laconic, sarcastic John Winger (Murray) and neurotic, wary Russell Ziskey (Ramis) won over audiences with their gently subversive “stick it to the man” attitude towards authority, as personified by Sergeant Hulka (the late, great Warren Oates), while at the same time extolling the virtues of camaraderie and courage. It’s very funny, engaging, and also a pretty decent little action-adventure movie towards the end.

For his score, Bernstein fashioning at its core a rousing, energetic military march – something he was certainly no slouch at. While Winger and Ziskey spend the movie trying to undermine the army, Bernstein picks up the ironic fact that it is actually what fulfils their potential. Throughout the course of the film the Stripes march slowly shifts from representing Hulka’s training to the selfless actions of our unlikely heroes.

The communist enemies are given a dirge-like Soviet anthem, while the two (somewhat unprofessional!) Military Police women seduced by Winger and Ziskey have a flighty, feminine musical signature, and all major ideas are wittily combined in an epilogue scene (inspired by Animal House) in which we learn the fates of the characters (very much on a par with a similar type of piece John Williams wrote for the end of 1941). The combat scenes too, involving a secret military vehicle disguised as a RV, are scored with all the verve and wallop one usually associates with Bernstein’s action cues.

But for all the bombast within Stripes, perhaps my favourite part of the score is the melancholic but catchy piano and clarinet motif for the depressing series of events that lead the pair to join the army. The music perfectly captures how a succession of misfortunes literally ruins their lives, making us both sympathise and be amused by their predicament.

Stripes was another score well over-due a release, and once again Varese filled a major gap in our collections.

And that’s the fact, Jack!

Seven Samurai / Rashomon Music composed by FUMIO HAYASAKA

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

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Seven Samurai and Rashomon are, of course, highly influential Japanese works that rank highly on just about every list of top films going. It might sound like a pretentious, dilettante thing to say something like “Oh, I love Akira Kurosawa”, but he was a master storyteller and his films really are exemplary productions that helped shape the language of cinema.

When he met Akira Kurosawa in 1947, it was the joining of two kindred spirits, creating a director-composer collaboration that, while all too brief, ranks as one of the greatest. Indeed, Kurosawa so valued his composer that he would ask for Hayasaka’s input on visual ideas in order to make them the best they could be for inspiring music.

Although both are set in feudal Japan, writer/director Kurosawa was heavily influenced by Hollywood cinema (a favour it would often return), and his characters and stories are easily accessible to western audiences. Both films are dripping with clever ideas, sharp dialogue, superb photography and groundbreaking editing, and also two absolutely superb scores by Fumio Hayasaka.

For the 1950 film Rashomon, which views a crime through varying vested perspectives, Kurosawa specifically asked Hayasaka to base his score on Ravel’s Bolero, his interpretation of which takes up over ten minutes of this 18 minute suite. The remaining music is dominated by woodwind and percussion, evoking a real sense of mystery, and mixing hints of the Japanese rural setting with the low, moody influence of one of his inspirations, the Hollywood composer Bernard Herrmann. It’s a stunning work, but merely the appetiser for the main course on this CD.

While the Japanese releases of the original score were marred by poor sound and editing, the Varese release used new recordings that were digitally remastered to a truly superb standard. Of all the recordings I have of music from these two films (and I’ve gathered a few, including some stinkers), these remain for me the best available for sound quality and listening pleasure, arranged as they are into compelling, fluid and coherent suites. Japanese music is an acquired taste and can be off-putting to the uninitiated, so the first thing to note here is that both scores mostly avoid traditional trappings, and are surprisingly “western” in sound.

Hayasaka was a trailblazer, a self-taught composer who began writing works for concert prior to World War Two before composing music for films during and after the conflict.

Enjoying film work, he convinced his friend Akira Ifukube to do the same, and while Ifukube would find fame scoring a succession of Godzilla, monster and sci-fi movies, Hayasaka gravitated towards dramas.

Seven Samurai came along in 1954, and at the time it was the largest Japanese film production ever. The selection on this CD is 25 minutes, a reflection of its greater breadth and complexity - Hayasaka wrote nearly three hundred cues in just two months!

The story famously tells of starving farmers who hire seven ronin (masterless samurai) to defend their village from a large band of mounted bandits. The seven are also down on their luck, and agree to work for the honour of doing something righteous, along with food and a bed. The music has a grimness that reflects the central theme of hopelessness and suffering (especially through a deep, wordless, almost tuneless male choir that is just misery made sound). Hayasaka chose to limit the warmth of his music by removing the string section from his orchestra, save a cello and guitar.

The melancholy tone was also doubtless influenced by the fact that Hayasaka was himself dying as he wrote the score. Diagnosed with terminal tuberculosis, he wrote quickly for fear that his ill health may prevent him from working, passing away a year later at the age of just 41. He could not complete his final score, I Live in Fear (Record of a Living Being), which was finished by his assistant Masaru Sato, who then became Kurosawa’s regular composer for a time.

The score also took a leitmotif approach, something very unusual in Japanese film music at the time. His main Samurai theme combines a bold fanfare and march, later gracefully adapted into an elegy, while comical outsider of the seven Kikuchiyo (Toshiro Mifune) is sometimes scored for baritone saxophone and a mamba rhythm to reflect his rebellious streak (a jazz approach being something very alien in 1950s conformist Japan, as it transpires the character is actually a peasant masquerading as a samurai).

For me the absolute highlight of the suite is the scene where Kikuchiyo triumphantly steals an arquebus (matchlock musket) from the bandits, his victory emphasised by a rollicking, triumphant version of the Samurai march that wouldn’t be out of place in something like The Magnificent Seven, which is of course the most famous of numerous remakes of the film.

I could go on. I probably do. But this album is pure joy, and remains an absolute jewel I listen several times a year. It’s not easy to find, but if you come across one snap it up. It’s solid gold.

The [First] Great Train Robbery Music composed & conducted by JERRY GOLDSMITH

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

A gold-standard score for a film about 24-karat bullion, later discovered as a 24-track master? The stars were certainly well-aligned on this album which, with such an incredible source to work from, was released as a “hybrid” Super Audio CD (SACD) – a superior disc-based format introduced in 1999 that developers Sony and Philips intended to replace CD. Before we talk a little about the music and album, let me just say that I’m British so it is taking a supernatural effort for me not to refer this film as The FIRST Great Train Robbery. This was its UK title, to distance it from a famous real-life “great train robbery” that had occurred here in 1963, and it’s what I’ve always known it as.

Anyway, there’s something about trains that seems to bring out the very best in composers. Even the highlight of John Powell’s stunning recent score for Solo was, in my humble opinion, the spectacular Train Heist scene. Jerry Goldsmith was no exception, having composed icy, portentous music for the doomed train heading towards The Cassandra Crossing and a rollicking, exhilarating theme to accompany the locomotive of Breakheart Pass.

For me, however, his greatest score for a train – indeed, probably THE greatest score for a train – was The Great Train Robbery. Michael Crichton’s wonderful Victorian crime romp was filmed in 1978, and based on his own novel. It marked Jerry Goldsmith’s third collaboration with the writer/director, having scored Coma the year before and Pursuit in 1972. Crichton reworked the story, which was more serious in print, into a largely comical caper, realising that humour would better fit a successful movie version. His instinct proved right on the money, and the final film, even though it has its darker moments, is an absolute delight.

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Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland and Lesley Anne Down starred as a trio of conspirators who plot to steal a shipment of gold from a moving train during the Crimean War. To do so they first need to make copies of the safe’s four keys, leading to a number of highly amusing incidents involving deceit, vice, subterfuge and... well, more vice. The film caught the period perfectly, with authentic Victorian criminal slang, fabulous costumes and excellent sets and props. It also picked up on the deep moral hypocrisy that permeated Victorian society, and the contrast between the polished opulence and staid social convention of the wealthy against the raucous behaviour and filthy slums of the poor.

The actual robbery is the film’s undoubted highlight, appearing authentic because it actually did endanger Connery during its filming. The actor performed many of his own stunts, and was required to make his way along the top of a moving train, hopping between carriages and dodging signals and bridges.

The coaches were actually specially made props constructed from modern railway wagons with a non-slip coating on their roofs, while Connery was given special rubber-soled shoes.

However, the train driver miscalculated the speed of the engine, taking it to 50 miles per hour instead of the arranged 20mph. Connery slipped and nearly fell during one jump, and the smoke and ash that he keeps having to rub from his eyes was quite real.

All of this makes for an exciting extended sequence, which Jerry Goldsmith carefully left unscored until the very end, for which he wrote one of the best cues in his career, “The Gold Arrives”. This track features a huge statement of the main theme, one of the finest of his career – an insanely infectious and ebullient tune set to the repetitive churning rhythm of a locomotive, and often punctuated with rasping trombones or

propelled by chopping cellos. No other piece of music I can of music I can think of epitomises steam trains better.

The theme appears throughout the score in a number of guises, and was even flexible enough to be used as a waltz, depicting the staid gentry as they ride through Hyde Park in the cue “Rotten Row”.

The Varese Deluxe Edition wasn’t the first appearance of the music on CD - the original 10-track selection of cues from the 1979 vinyl had been paired with Wild Rovers by the British label Memoir, with liner notes written by my much missed friend and fellow Goldsmith Society committee member, the late Barry Spence.

Varese’s album, however, came about when the 24-track masters were unearthed which, aside from restoring a number of important missing cues, allowed for a surround sound release on the aforementioned multi-channel SACD format. SACD required special hardware to play back the enhanced content, and those who could do so greatly acclaimed the sound. However, the need to upgrade equipment led to poor sales and by 2007 the SACD format was pretty much discontinued, though it does still have a devoted audiophile following who believe it to be the pinnacle of quality.

What nobody could argue about, though, was the quality of the music, and despite an even more complete version of the score appearing since I still have a soft spot for this release which was, at the time, a bold indicator of how Varese had its eye constantly on the cutting edge of technology.

Cleopatra

Music composed & conducted by ALEX NORTH

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Wanton lust. Behind the scenes plotting. Temperamental outbursts. Betrayal and backstabbing. All of these things were major components of the 1963 film Cleopatra – and some of them even made it onto the screen too.

The many problems that plagued the legendary epic’s production are well documented – not least in the excellent, detailed liner notes by Film Score Monthly’s Jeff Bond that feature in the substantial booklet included in this release (along with a comprehensive biography of Alex North

by Robert Townson). Cleopatra was not a run of the mill production, and its many delays and changes caused it to become at the time the most expensive film ever made, nearly bankrupting Fox. Bad weather, a major relocation, a spiralling budget, rampant egos, high-profile firings and a media circus pursuing a lurid extramarital scandal – the stories behind the scenes were almost as dramatic as the life of the queen herself (who on screen owed as much to Shakespeare as actual history, due to her proclivity for marrying close family members like her father and brother).

Indeed, the only people who did seem to have any good fortune from Cleopatra were the cast and crew of 1964 British satire Carry On Cleo, who gained access to sets left behind when the production shifted from Britain to Italy after director Rouben Mamoulian was fired and replaced by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Because of this Cleo often has a look that far belied the low budget of the innuendo-laden comedy. As Marc Anthony put it so succinctly, “Blimus!”

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Regular Carry On composer Eric Rogers, while producing a fun faux-epic score that I actually like a lot, wisely made no attempt to follow in the footsteps of Alex North though. For Cleopatra, the master composer produced another huge, complex, undeniable work of genius.

Coming three years after Spartacus and sharing roughly the same historic period (both feature Julius Caesar at different stages of his life), Cleopatra’s score is every bit as astounding as its illustrious forebear. Once again North took a different slant on the ancient epic genre, eschewing the ardent romanticism and triumphal pomp commonly employed in such movies in favour of a challenging and modernist approach that better suited the turbulent mood of a Rome coveting its North African neighbour, and a central romantic liaison that was as much politics as it was passion.

Cues are often dissonant, jagged, with complex multi-layered rhythms and themes teased and hinted at many times before they appear in fully developed form. For Cleopatra herself, North creates a duality of approach that keeps the woman and the queen musically distinct. The love theme is beautiful and seductive, hypnotically shimmering with femininity and sensuality. At the same time, though, there is the vulnerability to it, for a woman who knows that for all her status she is ultimately a pawn in the ambitions of Rome and the men who lead it.

As queen of Egypt though, North gives her the power and importance befitting her position. For her grand entry into Rome, she is preceded by the trappings of Egyptian power and wealth. North captures the grandeur, majesty and exoticism of the scene in a processional cue quite unlike any other. This is not an overt celebration, it is a statement, and the composer seems to rhythmically match the shuffling feet of the hundreds of slaves pulling a giant sphinx Cleopatra rides atop (and in a later scene the rowing of galley slaves), as if her fame, influence and position are a relentless burden built on the misery of others.

This double CD is an amazing release, and excellent value.

There is an enormous amount of music here, over two and a half hours - the cue for the decisive Battle of Actium alone is a near-15 minute cue of incredible complexity, power and energy.

Cleopatra had been released before, but never like this.

Restored and remastered with the involvement of Nick Redman and Film Score Monthy’s Lukas Kendall, this is the definitive version and will probably always remain so.

In fact, were it not for the sheer opulence of the Spartacus box set, this would be in the running for the ultimate Alex North release, which by logical extension makes it one of the greatest soundtrack releases ever.

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire 40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Music composed & conducted by JOEL McNEELY VSD-5565

Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was an ambitious multimedia project in 1996 - an original story that followed the hunt for the carbonite-encased Han Solo between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The idea was to see if Star Wars fans would buy into new material and merchandise normally tied to a film, but with no actual film to go with them.

As someone who had lived and breathed Star Wars since it first arrived in the UK in 1978 (and still does), this was for me... and it was good!

Young Indy composer Joel McNeely was Robert’s first choice, being not only familiar to LucasFilm but also by then a regular part of the Varese family with his stunning new recordings of classic film music for the label. Working from the novel and production art, McNeely composed over 50 minutes of music, which was recorded in Glasgow with the fully symphonic might of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and choir. Although primarily a soundtrack release, selections also made it into the video game too.

The project included a novel by Steve Perry, a comic by Judge Dredd creator John Wagner, trading cards, action figures, model kits and other merchandise. A videogame was also released, first on the Nintendo 64 and later on PC, where it one of the first to require a 3D accelerator card (thus boosting their sales and popularity hugely).

According to Wookieepedia the composer has been retrospectively self-critical of this project due to the short time he had to compose it. However, many fans were impressed by McNeely’s interpretation of the new characters and his impressionistic rendering of the story’s exotic locations – notably the shimmering descent to the man-made canyons of Imperial capital Coruscant, giving way to huge, regal fanfares and an opulent, magnificent theme making full use of the orchestra and choir.

Additionally there was “Secrets of Shadows of the Empire”, a making-of book which features a full chapter on the other major component of the project – an original orchestral and choral score. Having worked with LucasFilm on their quartet of releases from The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Robert Townson originally had an idea for producing music for Timothy Zahn’s brilliant Heir to the Empire books, the “Thrawn trilogy”. Sadly this project never happened, though the Grand Admiral did eventually get musical representation in 2017, in the form of a stunning organ motif from Kevin Kiner in Star Wars: Rebels.

When the Shadows project emerged Robert quickly suggested that a music score would be an interesting and important addition, and that Varese was a natural fit. LucasFilm eventually agreed, after George Lucas himself endorsed the idea - and the rest is history.

Putting the wars in Star Wars, there is also powerful, solid action music for the story’s numerous battles. McNeely’s approach differed to John Williams’ sometimes frantic, dissonant approach (due to his music often having to be set to short, sharp visual effects shots) by taking his time to let ideas develop and flow naturally as the listener provides their own imagined VFX. The story’s major new characters are similarly well served.

Heroic scoundrel Dash Rendar, Han Solo’s replacement while the Corellian smuggler is absent, is given a teasing blast of an energetic, brassy motif that sadly only appears at the climax of Beggar’s Canyon Chase. It’s far too brief, and makes you wish a full version had been written and recorded.

The same can’t be said for the theme for the new bad guy, the Falleen Prince Xizor, who gets perhaps the most impressive track on the album all to himself. A pheromoneemitting reptilian crime lord who vies with Darth Vader for the Emperor’s favour, Xizor is elegant and exotic but also primal, sexual and incredibly dangerous. McNeely captures his complex character at first gently, his music shadowy, the choir whispering like the many spies and enemies that lurk on the dark fringes of the criminal Black Sun organisation Xizor heads. About halfway through though, roaring horns herald a propulsive, drum laden theme that encapsulates Xizor’s charismatic power, a grandly sweeping and quite hypnotic piece that still remains exotic enough to reflect his alien nature.

Some reviewers complained that Williams’ themes did not appear enough, being limited to the Main Title (of course, how could it not begin so!), a quote of the Carbon Freeze scene, a wonderful version of the Force theme and references to the Imperial March. Such views missed the point of the project, as if all LucasFilm wanted was an album of existing Williams’ material, that’s exactly what they could and would have done.

The Shadows of the Empire album was released on both audio cassette (aw, how quaint!) and compact disc, with a superb Drew Struzan cover (painted for the novel). It was also an Enhanced CD, with multimedia content available when put in a PC CD-ROM drive.

With Star Wars now a Disney-owned juggernaut, it’s hard to imagine a time when there was hardly any new content being produced, and how exciting this bold experiment was back then.

Hollywood ‘95 40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Big-budget sci-fi, fantasy and action films are genres that often draw out the very best work from composers, and 1995 was a vintage year. Proof, it were needed, is this CD, which also harks back to the beginning of a relationship between label, conductor and orchestra that is easily on a par with that of RCA, Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic Orchestra.

The “Hollywood [year]” series was an annual compilation of music conducted by Joel McNeely, beginning in 1994 with the Seattle Symphony before moving to the Royal Scottish National Orchestra for 1995 and 1996. Sadly, only three releases were made before the series came to an end.

For me Hollywood ’95 was the high point, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I love compilations. They take me back to the many such albums my dad had when I was growing up, and later when I had a job that required me to commute (on a route that was often jammed) a good compilation could keep even the dullest journey interesting.

When I was starting out as a collector they were also a great way of discovering new scores too – many of my introductions to classic scores came from the likes of the aforementioned Charles Gerhardt’s legendary series, Kunzel’s Cincinnati Pops CDs and of course Varese’s precursor to this series, the “Hollywood Soundstage” albums.

Secondly, of the three “Hollywood” releases this has the best cover too – an evocative painting of a Gotham-like city

by Matthew Peak. Any CD that has a Matthew Peak cover instantly scores extra points.

Music composed by Elliot Goldenthal, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, James Newton Howard, Alan Silvestri and Miklós Rózsa JOEL McNEELY conducting the Royal Scottish National Orchestra VSD-5671

Thirdly, the selection of scores on this CD absolutely rocks.

This isn’t a criticism of the selections and sequencing of the other two albums, more a reflection on just what a storming year for film music 1995 was.

Jumping forward, I think the same is true of Casper’s Lullaby, a beautiful, reflective cue with some truly gorgeous violin, piano and choral playing. Horner’s third cue is the theme from Braveheart, an old school romantic melody.

It begins with a five track, 10 minute suite of cues from Elliot Goldenthal’s Batman Forever. Many fans groaned when it was revealed that the composer would be taking over from Danny Elfman for the third movie of the Batman series, though it made sense when you consider it had a new director and actor too. In any case, Goldenthal quickly silenced any doubts when he produced what is for me the finest score of any for DC’s caped detective. McNeely captures fully the brooding darkness, Wagnerian grandeur and manic, complex energy of the music, as well as its more quirky and sultry twists. I love the original soundtrack and the expanded release, but whenever I fancy just a quick, mighty burst of Batman Forever, this is where I head.

Alan Silvestri provided a suite from his exceptional Judge Dredd score, a thunderous and epic affair that caught perfectly the scale of the stunningly rendered Mega-City One and Dredd’s machine-like combat skills. Debuting on this album, and causing much excitement at the time, was the brief but dynamic, percussive trailer music for the same film composed by Jerry Goldsmith, who was originally assigned but had to drop out due to commitments with Congo and First Knight. It was a tantalising taste of a score that never was.

The first of three James Horner cues on the album comes from his superb Apollo 13 score. At just under ten minutes “The Launch” is the lengthiest track on the album as it calmly, determinedly counts down to Apollo 11’s ignition with a steady, confident version of the noble theme over a soft, unyielding rhythm. When that ignition comes and the Saturn V rocket roars skyward Horner unleashes one of his most exciting set pieces, taking his theme gloriously loud and punctuating it with snarling trombones and agitated strings as a minor glitch causes a moment of concern, before relaxing into a heavenly choir. For all the length of the cue it never once loses your interest, and in my opinion is superior in depth and performance to the OST version.

Speaking of First Knight, although this was a score that also had plenty of action in it, Hollywood ‘95 instead focused on the dignified, honourable nature of Sean Connery’s King Arthur and his Camelot, with the now famous royal fanfare followed by the gorgeous end title.

The fragile theme for Lady Guinevere, which forms the centre of the track, is simply exquisite. Lastly we have James Newton Howard’s Waterworld, my personal favourite of his scores and another filled with stunning action music but here presenting the sweeping theme with an epic and emotional breadth.

My final reason for loving this album? A heartfelt tribute to Miklos Rozsa, who had then just recently passed away.

That Hamilton Woman was selected, a rich romantic melody with some of the most beautiful string writing you will ever hear. It was a perfect and proper conclusion to a great CD.

Lonely Are The Brave Music Composed by JERRY GOLDSMITH, conducted by Joseph Gershenson

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Jerry Goldsmith’s film scoring career started in 1957 with the minor western Black Patch, but it would take another five years, and another western (of sorts) for him to really make his mark in Hollywood. Lonely Are The Brave came about after Goldsmith’s early work impressed the hugely respected and influential Alfred Newman, who recommended the 33 year-old to Universal. It was a golden opportunity not wasted.

It would be unfair and inaccurate to suggest, as some have, that Goldsmith owed his career to the elder statesman of the Hollywood film music scene. Newman was indeed famously generous in his promotion of new talent, but it was support forthcoming on merit only. It is fairer to say that Newman’s endorsement raised Goldsmith’s profile, but it was his exceptional, innovative musical abilities that carried him the rest of the way.

1962’s Lonely Are The Brave, coupled with Goldsmith’s first Oscar nomination for Freud in the same year, demonstrated those abilities fully. Despite the early stage in his career, and the quality and quantity of the music he would go on to write over the next four decades, Lonely are the Brave remained one of Jerry Goldsmith’s greatest achievements and a personal favourite score.

The film merges the best components of the classic western movie with the excitement of a police manhunt as contemporary cowboy Jack Burns (Kirk Douglas) falls foul of the law in New Mexico and makes a run for the border on his beloved horse Whiskey, entering into a battle of wits against a modern police force equipped with vehicles, radios and helicopters.

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Burns is a man not suited to his time. He lives by a strict personal code and eschews any of the trappings (and responsibilities) of modern life. His home is wherever he builds a campfire and he sleeps under the stars, but his “big country” is being increasingly divided up, built over and fenced off by the spread of modern America.

I won’t say too much about the film, as there will doubtless be those of you who haven’t seen it. If you’re amongst that number, it really does deserve your time – and not just for Jerry Goldsmith’s music, which is jaw-droppingly good, but also for its sharp script (by Spartacus writer Dalton Trumbo, based on Edward Abbey’s novel Brave Cowboy), sun-bleached monochrome cinematography, excellent pace and exquisite performances. Kirk Douglas, now over 100 years of age, regards it as his very best film, and Walter Matthau is fabulous as the sympathetic, world-weary Sheriff tasked with capturing Burns. The film also cleverly sets up the ending throughout, though it still comes as a punch in the gut.

There are strong parallels between this film and First Blood, which Goldsmith scored twenty years later. Outwardly both concern a drifter hunted by cops (including one who is a sadist with a vendetta), and both question exactly how much freedom there is to be had in “the land of the free” if your lifestyle doesn’t conform to the norm.

The scores too have some parallels. Both are centred on an introspective Americana-styled theme, and both use the trumpet to imbue it with a sense of isolation for the protagonist. Another thing they share is some of the composer’s finest tension, chase and action music. However, there are notable differences too. While First Blood’s John Rambo is a character haunted by his past, with no comfort

or respite to be found in his musical internalisation, Burns is a man who loves his cowboy lifestyle and the traditional instruments of the old west frequently reinforce this.

The score has many, many highlights, from the anxious music for the jailbreak (setting the scene for similar sounds in the likes of Von Ryan’s Express), the entire suite of exciting cues for the pursuit through the hills, and the aforementioned bar fight, as Burns squares off against a drunk, rage-fuelled one-armed WW2 veteran. This is one of Goldsmith’s fiercest cues, as relentless and brutal as Burn’s opponent (and eventually the entire clientele), until the composer suddenly smacks you in the face with a lively mariachi celebration as the police come to his rescue.

It would be nearly half a century before an album finally arrived, though in the late 1980s Intrada had tried to make a new recording with the composer conducting (it couldn’t be organised and they did Rio Conchos instead).

Once again, the Varese CD Club came to the rescue when, in 2009, to mark what would have been the 80th Birthday of Jerry Goldsmith, they released this album. At last fans could hear the score and its fabulous main theme in superb, clear sound, from the gentle guitar that opens it through to the heart-wrenching conclusion. Put simply this is a must-have.

Jerry Goldsmith could occasionally be blasé about whether some of his scores made it onto album or not, but this was one he really wanted to see released. Sadly, that never happened before his death - but there can be no doubt this CD would have delighted him.

Legends Of Hollywood: Franz Waxman Volumes 1-4 40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

“I never met Franz Waxman, but I was always impressed by his musicality.” So said Jerry Goldsmith of the Golden Age master, when introducing a suite from The Spirit of St. Louis in concert at Nottingham in 1994.

Waxman’s extraordinary abilities were frequently recognised and admired by other composers, both his peers - Bernard Herrmann called his music for Taras Bulba “the score of a lifetime” – and by the many who followed him. The Danish film composer Soeren Hyldgaard, a dear friend of mine who sadly passed away earlier this year, was so taken with Waxman’s music he produced what many consider to be the definitive restoration of Bride of Frankenstein, which was recorded by William Alwyn in the early 1990s.

When you think about the Golden Age composers, you realise what a melting pot of talent Hollywood was in the 1930s and 1940s. Miklós Rózsa, Dimitri Tiomkin, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman, Max Steiner, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Victor Young and the many others whose names were less well known - a merging of the best of American home grown talent and those who made their way from Europe and Russia, often escaping the dark shadows being cast by Hitler and Stalin.

Waxman was one of those immigrants, born Franz Wachsmann in 1906 in Prussian Silesia (now a part of Poland) and of Jewish lineage. The poor eyesight he struggled with throughout his life was the result of having scalding water tipped onto his face in a kitchen accident when aged three, though this never held back his ambitions – he studied composition and conducting in Dresden and later Berlin, funding himself by playing piano on the dance band scene.

It was there he met composer Friedrich Hollaender (later Anglicised in exile to Frederick Hollander).

Music composed by FRANZ WAXMAN Richard Mills conducting the Queensland Symphony Orchestra VSD-5242 / VSD-5257 / VSD 5480 / VSD-5713

With Hollander’s help Waxman spent several years as an orchestrator. However, being of Jewish origin Waxman found himself the victim of Nazi thugs, who beat him so seriously he had to flee Berlin for Paris. There he joined a community of expatriate Jews sacked from their jobs in the German film industry, who had banded together to continue working. After co-writing the music for several projects, his debut solo score was for Liliom, directed by Fritz Lang in 1934.

Not long after that Waxman moved to Los Angeles, where the composer soon met director James Whale, who had loved the music for Liliom and Waxman’s adventurous use of electronica in the form of three ondes martenots. Whale was seeking something uniquely creepy for his next project, and the Bride of Frankenstein quickly followed in 1935, an otherworldly and remarkably inventive score that announced Waxman’s Hollywood arrival. It was so admired that it won him the job of Head of Music at Universal, a largely management role which did not suit him, and so he quit within a year to focus on composing – a decision for which all film music fans can the thankful!

Waxman was motivated heavily by the desire to compose music for projects that inspired him, rather than ones that just paid the rent. He took the unusual step of leaving the studio system in 1947 to work freelance, allowing him to pick and choose his jobs – a potentially risky strategy, though his talent meant he was never short of offers. He earned twelve Academy Award nominations, and was the first composer to win for two consecutive years (for Sunset Boulevard and A Place in the Sun in 1950 and 1951). His death in 1967 aged just 60 cut short an astounding talent, though his legacy was secure with over 150 film scores plus television pieces and numerous concert works

Franz Waxman’s music always excited me with its bold themes, chameleon-like diversity and experimental or unexpected flourishes of colour and texture. It always felt somewhat ahead of its time, and these four CDs are a treasure trove of his work.

The composer’s son, the film music expert, author and consultant John W. Waxman was a leading figure in this project, which was nearly a decade in the making. Created as a companion to and natural extension of the Sunset Boulevard compilation recorded by Charles Gerhardt for RCA (and repeating none of the music on it), each album features a very generous selection of suites and themes, eight tracks per volume (save number two, which has nine).

So much material had never been released – in fact, some were being played for the first time since Waxman’s original recordings. Most genres you can think of are represented – westerns, war, thrillers, horror, romance, comedy, historical dramas, high adventure – all with an exquisitely edited presentation of important themes and ideas as taken from Waxman’s own archive or given new life by the exceptional skill and insight of arranger Christopher Palmer.

Like Deleure’s London Sessions, there is simply no filler here. Each track is a stunning, self-contained reminder of some of film music’s greatest work. It would be impossible to select a handful of highlights. The sound quality is simply exceptional – if you want to test a speaker, try the French horns of the Huckleberry Finn Overture!

Franz Waxman was a true genius and a consummate artist, and this collection is essential. Varese deserves our sincere thanks for bringing it to us.

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Today we look at a hugely talented but very modest composer who was often overshadowed by his peers – and was quite happy with that state of affairs. Hugo Friedhofer never had any desire to reinvent the wheel. He was strictly old school a lover and practitioner of the nineteenth century European classical idiom, motivated simply by making the sort of music he knew and loved, but doing it to the absolutely highest standard. His semi-obscurity often extends into the collections of soundtrack fans, a situation Varese attempted to help remedy with this wonderful, excellent value double-CD release combining two of Freidhofer’s finest scores.

Born in 1901, Hugo Wilhelm Friedhofer narrowly missed the nineteenth century that was the principle influence on his extensive Hollywood career. Despite his Germanic name (his parents were German immigrants), he was an American composer who was credited with music for over 150 movies, shorts and television episodes, as well as a large volume of uncredited stock and incidental music.

Born in San Francisco, his initial interest wasn’t in composing but playing. He took up the cello at the age of 13, and at 28 he moved to Hollywood to become a session player at Fox Studios. However, he had studied composition with Italian composer Dominico Brescia as well as harmony and counterpoint at Berkeley. With this background, he soon found himself hired in the more regular and better paid role of an orchestrator at Warner Bros. where he was often assigned to Max Steiner (for over fifty scores) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold (fifteen) because he was fluent in German. Both composers came to rely on his ability to translate their sketches into full scores, and for several years Friedhofer worked diligently in this capacity.

The Young Lions / This Earth is Mine Music composed by HUGO FRIEDHOFER, conducted by Lionel Newman and Joseph Gershenson VSD2-5403

In 1937 Friedhofer was given the chance to score The Adventures of Marco Polo, leading to a steady stream of assignments between orchestration work and composing before being given the commission that was the turning point in his career, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946. Wyler had resisted, wanting the legendary composer Alfred Newman for his prestigious movie and not some relative unknown. Newman, however, petitioned for Friedhofer, sensing a rising new talent. He was too respected and powerful to be contradicted, and Friedhofer got the job. Wyler needn’t have worried in any case. Friedhofer’s music won that year’s Oscar, beating no less than Bernard Herrmann (Anna and the King of Siam), William Walton (Henry V), Franz Waxman (Humoresque) and Miklós Rózsa (The Killers).

Hollywood now fully sat up and noticed Friedhofer, and before long more Academy Award nominations were rolling in, including Joan of Arc (he famously described his end scene music to David Raksin as “the barbecue”), Above and Beyond, Between Heaven and Hell, An Affair to Remember and The Young Lions, the first of the two scores included in this set.

Released in 1958, The Young Lions was directed by Edward Dmytryk from a 1948 novel by Irwin Shaw. It tells the separate stories of three WW2 soldiers (Nazi Marlon Brando and G.I.s Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin) and the effect the war has on their characters as they converge towards a tragic conclusion. The film isn’t as much a war film as it is drama that happens to be set in the war. Each must tackle their own relationship crises and personal demons – Brando’s German officer begins to question is blind faith in Hitler, Clift’s Jewish-American GI faces home-grown prejudice and Martin’s spoiled, arrogant playboy must face up to his shortcomings as a soldier.

With the scenes of warfare limited (making them all the more powerful when they occur), the film is very much a character study, and much of that examination is provided by Friedhofer. His opening title music is a powerful militaristic march, but contains no glory. It is a grim, relentless reflection of the brutality of combat an approach that became popular later as Hollywood’s cynicism towards Vietnam infiltrated WW2 films.

Required often to support dialogue, the score to The Young Lions is by turns thoughtful, romantic and lush, though it also becomes surprisingly modernistic and downbeat in some of the scenes of devastation.

The score for This Earth Is Mine is more typical, and the film is melodrama in its highest form. It follows the effects of prohibition on a winemaking dynasty in California’s Napa Valley, and the contradictory machinations of patriarch Claude Rains, who has no qualms about using loveless arranged marriages to fulfil his ambitions but won’t sell his grapes to bootleggers. Friedhofer’s score, while unashamedly old-fashioned, doesn’t lapse into maudlin. A single primary theme dominates, appearing at first in songform (something coming into vogue in the late 1950s), and the score mostly serves the film’s long tracts of dialogue and intrigue with an underlying precision.

Friedhofer composed well into the 1970s, though his project options became limited as film music’s own “young lions”, the likes of Goldsmith and Williams and Schifrin, began to command the choicest jobs. Hugo Friedhofer never did reinvent the wheel - he just made incredibly good wheels. This double CD really deserves tracking down and giving a spin.

Total Recall: The Deluxe Edition Music composed & conducted by JERRY GOLDSMITH

40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

I remember the day I bought the original Total Recall album like it was yesterday. It was 1990 and, as the film had yet to hit my local cinema and with no internet reviews to read beforehand back then, it was a purchase I made based purely on the name of Jerry Goldsmith and the fact that it was a movie by the guy who had made Robocop. Of course I knew it would be good – what I didn’t know was exactly HOW good.

I’m sure all film music fans remember the first time they heard this absolute masterpiece. The power, the complexity, the energy, the invention – it was a jaw-dropping, breathtaking, pulse-pounding experience. Nearly three decades and literally hundreds of plays later, it remains so. When I first played it to my dad (on the same day I bought it, I was so excited to get round his house and share it with a fellow film music aficionado), he paused after the last track had faded and said simply “How THE HELL do you even start composing something like THAT!?” He did have a way with words, my dad.

Based loosely on a 1966 Philip K. Dick story, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, the film follows Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a married construction worker haunted by dreams of Mars and a mysterious woman. He visits Rekall, a company that can implant memories of holidays with fictionalised twists, thus saving you the expense and hassle of ever actually having to visit anywhere. He hopes that by “experiencing” Mars as a secret agent his dreams will make more sense, but it all goes wrong when it emerges that Quaid’s identity is already an implant, and he really is a secret agent from Mars! Travelling to the red planet, he becomes involved a twisted plot involving corporate corruption, a mutant underclass and a mysterious machine of alien origin.

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With amazingly choreographed action scenes and visual effects that still impress (it was at the time the most expensive film ever made) Total Recall is a full-throttle thrill ride, something heralded by Goldsmith’s propulsive opening theme, a powerful attention grabber that plays over a superbly designed and animated title sequence.

This theme appears throughout the score, but never again in the same complete form (save for the end credits). Its driving synth rhythm and distinctive slapstick sound permeate some later action sequences, while the actually melody becomes associated with Quaid, but in surprisingly subtle ways. There is some lovely synth and string variations that underscore the film’s more thoughtful, quirky or expository scenes, working as the glue that holds together Quaid’s detective work.

The bad guys, led by psychopathic husband and wife team Richter (Michael Ironside) and Lori (Sharon Stone), also get a distinctive motif, snarling and fragmented as they hunt their quarry or stabbing and thundering through chase sequences (of which there are many), and even letting Richter briefly mourn Lori after the immortal “Considda dat a deevorce” scene. Another motif is attached to the huge alien reactor, often exuding quiet wonder and providing the film with a sweeping denouement as the citizens of Mars emerge into a changed world.

But of course Total Recall is best known for its violence and, being a Paul Verhoeven film, it’s shockingly brutal – I still feel sorry for the poor guy who ends up as a human shield on the escalator! The many fights and chases are scored with a level of momentum that few other action scores have ever achieved. There are times when Goldsmith seems to make his own Rambo scores feel like Chopin.

While connected by core ideas, these cues still manage to be varied and distinctive to each set-piece; for example The Hollowgram, with its tense, ticking rhythm leading through to vicious musical blows as Richter is literally disarmed, or the churning strings and (again literally) eyepopping wailing brass of End of a Dream (sadly not used in full in the film). These tracks not only support the onscreen action but make the soundtrack album one of the most spectacular, varied and breathless listens out there.

Total Recall is also one of Goldsmith’s most flawless integrations of synthesisers and orchestra, the latter being the sublime National Philharmonic Orchestra. The NPO famously became the second orchestra contracted after the producers attempted to save money by recording with the Graunke Symphony in Germany – an undoubtedly very fine collective of musicians who had difficulty with the score’s complexity, and lacked the NPO’s advantage of a long relationship and special understanding of the composer.

Varese released a soundtrack of about 42 minutes in 1990, with a great selection of key cues but missing many important pieces. Ten years later this Deluxe version was produced, adding another half an hour and including sorely absent pieces such as the Johnny Cab chase, the “Howdy, Stranger” pursuit, the arrival at Mars and the Venusville massacre, along with comprehensive liner notes and a startling variation on the poster which shifted the usual cool blue to a decidedly Martian red.

Total Recall is an essential part of any film music collection - music that is, very appropriately, simply unforgettable.

Jerry Goldsmith at 20th Century Fox 40 reflections on personal favourite CDs by GARY KESTER in celebration of four decades of VARÈSE SARABANDE

Day 40 of 40 of my personal tribute to Varese Sarabande, and how else could we conclude it? Just as we started nearly six weeks ago with an incredible box set in the form of Spartacus, we end with another – a glorious celebration of Jerry Goldsmith’s four decades of work for 20th Century Fox. This too was a truly landmark release, but one that came to have a bittersweet tinge to it.

As with Spartacus, it’s clear this was a labour of love for Robert Townson; a determination to deliver something truly special. Working directly with the composer and with Nick Redman (who also wrote the superb, extended liner notes), this six CD set was limited to 1500 copies, has a beautiful Art Deco design style by Matthew Peak and a lavishly illustrated full colour 64 page book. It was intended to be part of a yearlong celebration of the composer’s 75th birthday in 2004.

Sadly, on July 21st of that year Jerry Goldsmith passed away.

The news devastated the film music community and its fan base. After decades of astounding scores flowing steadily from the pen of the one of the most inventive, prolific and individual talents in film music – no, all music – the master was gone; a composer hugely respected and admired by his peers (“Gorgeous Jerry”, as John Williams called him), known as a consummate professional by those who worked with him, and, most of all, a man dearly loved by his family and friends.

Today, interest in Jerry Goldsmith’s work has never been stronger, and this set is frequently on the wish lists of fans new to his music. The amount of effort the Fox project involved is almost legendary in its own right. Suffice to say, locating and assembling the material on these six discs was a Herculean effort, and the selected tracks were divided roughly into two halves, split into groups of three discs each.

Music Composed by JERRY GOLDSMITH, conducted by Jerry Goldsmith and others VCL 0204 1028

The first half featured music that had been previously available, taking selections from classic scores and collecting them by genre – for example war, sci-fi, horror, western, drama etc. These served to reinforce exactly how diverse and exceptional Goldsmith’s work was, and just how many scores were groundbreaking and iconic – Planet of the Apes, Alien, The Blue Max, Patton, the Flint scores, The Omen trilogy, Justine, The Sand Pebbles... all are here and much, much more. In many ways I’m also using this selection to cheat a bit, as over the past 40 days there have probably been those wondering how could I not include any of the above!

Something I can say with absolute honesty is this – if it had fallen to me to sequence these first three discs, the cues chosen are almost identical to the selections I would have made, and I dare say the same is true of many other fans; these are the best of the best, and perhaps proof, if needed, of how in tune with Goldsmith fans this set is.

Discs 4 through 6 caused most excitement though, presenting huge amounts of previously unreleased material, though there are gaps where tapes had proven to be unobtainable, degraded beyond restoration or, in the case of Damnation Alley, the electronic overlays had been lost, rendering some cues unusable. Starting with The Agony And The Ecstasy prologue, which offered a fascinating chance to compare it with Goldsmith’s own late 1980s rerecording, rarity followed rarity - Shock Treatment, Fate Is The Hunter, Von Ryan’s Express, S*P*Y*S, The Chairman (a previous CD had been mastered from a vinyl), The Detective, Alien (alternative cues), Anna And The King, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, The Vanishing... a virtual smorgasbord of Goldsmith Holy Grails on which to feast.

And feast we did! Well, mostly... Some fans, incredibly, still found things to complain about. One discussion I found particularly funny was with a fan I knew who actually said to me at the time “Why did they put S*P*Y*S on it?

I hate that score! I’d give it one star on Amazon for that.”

I could only react by calmly and patiently explaining that the beauty of CD is that we can pick and choose tracks, and that if S*P*Y*S was not to his taste he should just not listen to it (though in hindsight I may have actually phrased it “Don’t be such a stupid, ungrateful ****!”)

The “Fox Box” was, and remains, a triumph. It became part of an obituary it was never intended nor wanted to be, but now fourteen years on stands as a stunning celebration not only of Jerry Goldsmith, but also of the levels Robert and his colleagues can and will go to. Even though Jerry is no longer with us, his musical legacy is eternal and incomparable. And a giant chunk of it is in our CD racks thanks to Varese Sarabande.