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Month of September, 1999

For the past ten years, the international Silva Screen label has provided countless albums of recordings by the City of Prague Philharmonic and Crouch End Festival Chorus. Since the very first of these compilation albums was released to the public, the players and singers of these groups have consistently improved their talents in performing the best of Western film music. In the past few years, the quality of their compilations has surpassed recordings by even the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Boston Pops and the London Symphony Orchestra, and have even obtained the same status as the famous Charles Gerhardt recordings. Like all performing groups, they have adaptations and interpretations that are better than others, though on the whole, their efforts have been spectacular.

Most recently, Silva Screen has begun releasing double CD sets devoted to single composers. These albums often contain at least 100 minutes of music, with the longer ones reaching 150 minutes in length. After the initial releases of compilations for Horner and Goldsmith in 1998, Silva has added three more so far in 1999. Excellent tributes to John Barry and Bernard Herrmann were followed by an entertaining album of John Williams' works. Together, these albums make for some of the best listening of the year, and the September, 1999, Filmtracks Theme of the Month offers reviews of all five of these double-CD releases, as well as links to previous releases of similar interest.

The Five Composer Compilations:

The Omen: The Essential Jerry Goldsmith Film Music Collection: (City of Prague Philharmonic) As one of the first of Silva's popular composer series of compilations, this double album offers a very wide selection of Goldsmith's best and most famous themes. Like the James Horner compilation also released in 1998, this set suffers from some of the same overlap problems; if you have purchased previous City of Prague Philharmonic/Silva albums, you will likely hear a healthy amount of music on those that you could otherwise get here. As usual, however, Silva offers excellent new suites as a selling incentive, and on this album, those suites might be too difficult to resist.

The album opens with the very best recording of a Goldsmith theme that the City of Prague Philharmonic has ever accomplished: Capricorn One. And although this same recording was available on a previous album (one of the Space and Beyond ones, I believe), I welcome it on as many as I can get. The superior sound quality of the Silva releases can best be heard right there. After a quality selection from Masada, the album's best feature follows. The fifteen minutes of music from Under Fire was a great surprise to see on the album, and a welcome one! The love theme (track 5 here) is superb, and the suite as a whole offers a great glimpse into some of the best portions of the original collectible. Basic Instinct gets washed away to a degree by the power of the surrounding tracks, including Great Train Robbery and The Omen, which was a successful part of one of Silva's Cinema Choral Classics CDs. The track from Baby: Secred of a Lost Legend has a very good representation of the harsh brass that bless the original, though a better cue for that theme could have been selected from the original (especially as heard on the SPFM compilation).


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Titanic: The Essential James Horner Collection: (The City of Prague Philharmonic) Repeat, repeat, repeat. There is a line that must not be crossed in the world of film music compilation performances and their subsequent CD releases. Many soundtrack collectors are weary of that line already, and it keeps them away from some compilation releases. The line is this: Silva compilations often include material that has been released on previous Silva compilations, thus making the album worthy of a consumer's dollars only for the newly added material. But how much new material is necessary on a CD to warrant its purchase? How much repeat is too much repeat? At what ratio between new material and previously released material can a line be drawn?

Silva has crossed the line with Titanic: The Essential James Horner Collection. I become interested in Silva's releases if two-thirds of the time on a CD consists of newly performed and released music. On this 2-CD Horner compilation, only about 40% of the material debuts here. As a consumer, it is saddening and frustrating, for it is the exact same group of performances rewrapped in a different cover, with a few token new performances, and regurgitated into the consumer market. The City of Prague Philharmonic has excelled at performing James Horner works in the past few years, and they are generally enjoyable. However enough is enough. Hopefully, the Jerry Goldsmith compilation upcoming next month from Silva will include a higher ratio of new performances.


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Zulu: John Barry Compilation: (City of Prague Philharmonic) After releasing a few much shorter and less energizing John Barry compilations early in the 1990s, Silva Screen releases over one hundred new minutes of Barry music on two CDs. The City of Prague and Crouch End Festival Chorus provide an improved performance of a wide variety of themes over those originals. This 2-CD set offers the complete score to Zulu as its centerpiece, with cues from films, musicals, and television commercials rounding out Silva's newest composer-based compilation. Similar sets are available for James Horner, Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, and Bernard Herrmann.

The complete score from Zulu is the main treat. With copies of the originals either missing or available in stereo, the entire score is reconstructed and performed with exactly the same number of performers as the original, which was about 70 (an interesting move --I would have liked to hear the theme with an even fuller orchestra, though, as perhaps a concert version). The choral cues of "Men of Harlech" are of immense size, however. This score crossed the minds of many people once again in 1995, when Barry used a softer, more sensitive version of the main title theme in Cry, The Beloved Country (which I would also recommend). Zulu's theme is a tad pompous, but fun nevertheless, and its only true weakness is the repetitive nature of it throughout the 20 minutes. Track five, featuring the bulk of the assault music, becomes tiresome after three minutes. It's not a very complex score, but its title theme is strong enough to carry the score.


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Citizen Kane: The Essential Bernard Herrmann Film Music Collection: (City of Prague Philharmonic) Very much like the John Barry Zulu compilation released by Silva at about the same time, this 2-CD tribute to the career of Bernard Herrmann features an excellent balance of classic themes and lesser known gems. The spring and summer of 1999 has produced a plethora of Herrmann (and Hitchcock) compilations, yet most of them feature the same old Psycho and Vertigo type of material we've all heard a hundred times. The best tracks on this album, though, are all inclusions from those scores that we haven't heard too often before, such as On Dangerous Ground, The Naked and the Dead, and Mysterious Island. Of all the compilations mentioned above, this one offers the best overall glimpse into the career of the cult favorite, Bernard Herrmann.

Near the start of the album, the selections from The Man Who Knew Too Much and North by Northwest are the only average representations on the entire set. I say "average" because they are still good performances, though I've heard them performed with more energy and life on the recent Hitchcock compilations of re-recordings. The track from Citizen Kane, which is oddly the title of the album even though it's one of the shortest on the album, is also a bit out of place. The rather light music for Citizen Kane came at a different (much earlier) time in his career -- before the truly brilliant dark and enticing music of his career began showing up. The highlight of the album is the ten minute suite from On Dangerous Ground, which features some of Herrmann's very best suspense music. It had been previously released in some form or another (on the Tsunami label, I believe), but to hear it in the level of crisp sound quality as it is here is a real treat.


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Close Encounters: The Essential John Williams Film Music Collection: (City of Prague Philharmonic) This compilation is the third in a series of composer-based 2CD tributes for Silva; in the latter half of 1998, the label released similar James Horner and Jerry Goldsmith compilations. All three follow the same mold, combining older City of Prague Philharmonic performances that have appeared on previous albums with a few new bright additions. For the Horner album, the new block of material was Titanic; for the Goldsmith album, it was Under Fire. And now, with so much of Williams' material already re-recorded, the new material is 18 previously unreleased minutes from the Western The Rare Breed. The album was released to coincide with The Phantom Menace mania, but ironically there isn't any material from the new Star Wars score included on this release.

The performances range greatly from stunning and superb to occasionally shabby. The best performances are always those that include the City of Prague Philharmonic and the Crouch End Festival Chorus together. Although beginning with a flat version of Temple of Doom, the fresh recording of Saving Private Ryan is a delight, capturing much of the solace of the original score. The Hook tracks are adequate --I've never been a fan of the concert suite arrangement of that music; I'd rather hear the epic and grand prologue performed without all the sub-themes dividing it. The brass section has a few noticable flubs at the start. The orchestral rendition of the Academy nominated song from the score is the better half of that duo. The Cowboys theme is performed very well, though the spunk could have been achieved through a faster mid-section. The heavy strings in the Born on the Fourth of July are very effective, and will not disappoint. People will likely be surprised by Family Plot, with its choral sections, and Rare Breed, with its grand opening to the suite. The JFK music runs a tad too long --10 minutes of that solemn music is abruptly broken up by the sudden and boisterous Empire of the Sun, with magnificent chorus.


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Other Recommended Silva Compilation Reviews:

• Warriors of the Silver Screen (1997)
• The Mark of Zorro/Crimson Pirate (1997)
• Cinema Choral Classics (1997)
• Cinema Choral Classics II (1998)
• Dr. Strangelove: Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick (1999)
• Cinema's Classic Romances (1998)
• Space and Beyond (1997)
• Alien Invasion: Space and Beyond II (1998)
• Music from the Films of Kevin Costner (1998)
• Music from the Films of Sean Connery (1998)
• Music from the Films of Mel Gibson (1998)
  
  
  ...And don't forget The City of Prague Philharmonic's outstanding
  1999 re-recording of John Barry's Raise the Titanic.
  

Themes of the Month Index

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Page created 8/29/99, updated 3/5/00. Version 3.1 (Filmtracks Publishing). All artwork and sound clips from the albums above are Copyright © 1997-2000, Silva Screen. Its appearance on this site is for informational, non-profit use, and may not be redistributed without their expressed written consent. Copyright © 1999-2000, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved.