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Conducted by:
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Allan Wilson
Guy Protheroe
Charles Thompson
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Co-Orchestrated by:
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Pete Anthony
Jon Kull
Bruce Babcock
Frank Bennett
John Bell
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Co-Produced by:
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Flavio Motalla
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Release Date:
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August 29th, 2000
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Availability:
Regular U.S. release. Promotional copies with slightly different art were pressed by GNP Crescendo in the weeks before the album's official release date.
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you'll take any Christopher Young horror score if it has
deep choral chants and periodic moments of lavish, orchestral themes.
Avoid it... if you consider Hellraiser II and The Fly II
to be the pinnacle of Young's horror writing, and want to avoid any lesser
incarnations of that music.
Filmtracks Editorial Review:
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Bless the Child: (Christopher Young) It is not often
that films have to deal with real life timing when considering their
production schedules, but the date January 1, 2000 had a special
significance for the plethora of films dealing with religious turmoil and,
potentially, the end of the world. The best known entry in this stock was
End of Days, which was timed perfectly to dwell upon Y2K fears. And
then there was Bless the Child, the Kim Basinger/Jimmy Smits film
that had a remarkably identical plot to End of Days, but was plagued
by a different kind of disaster. The film was re-written, re-shot, and
re-edited extensively, pushing its release date well into 2000 and thus
rendering the film somewhat void. Not surprisingly, the bad timing, as well
as the rehashing of the same old gateway-to-hell scenario, led the film down
the forgotten path to oblivion. Such cinematic floundering was no new
experience for composer Christopher Young, who would often write noteworthy
horror music for films that would hit a brick wall and fail miserably.
Bless the Child is such a case once again, with Young hired to
provide his classic horror sensibilities to a film that certainly didn't
deserve such orchestral majesty and ruckus. This score in particular was
reassuring to fans of Young's horror music, because at the turn of the
century, Young was leaving this mode of music behind and dabbling in more
electric organ-laced jazz for his newly discovered genre of arthouse drama.
So despite the similarities that the music Bless the Child shares
with previous Young horror scores, it was important for fans to know that
the horror master could conjure a massive horror effort whenever necessary,
regardless of the composer's experimentation with different, less ominous
genres.
The score for Bless the Child does not feature the
same awe-inspiring thematic development as his Hellraiser work or
The Fly II, which established Young as the go-to guy for
overwhelming, Gothic themes. There are several twenty-second blasts of
harmonious terror in Bless the Child, but never the sustained
material famous in Young's best works. On the other hand, Young does
maintain a more consistent underscore for Bless the Child,
alternating between strong, highly effective dissonance and more traditional
choral chants. The deep, male chants perform a simplistic "rowing motif"
(they sound as though they could come right out of a Viking film, with that
same, throaty edge to their performance). As expected, there are some
lighter, upper range choral performances for moments of religious awe. But
Young doesn't back them up with the full pounding of the orchestra as he has
in the past. There is no cymbal-crashing exclamation point on the measures,
and at times the bass strings provide less of the deep accompaniment than
the score could have used. The performers of the London Metropolitan
Orchestra don't seem to flourish with the same lavish enthusiasm that
performers have exhibited in similar recordings of Young's horror music. The
result of the occasionally less than stellar orchestral sound --and this may
be due to any one of many factors, including diminished group size-- is that
the score falls back into a more cliched mode of presentation. Young's
horror music always walks that fine between cliche and innovation --a
standard he created largely by himself in the late 1980's-- and without an
overwhelming performance, the score can leave you wanted more power behind
the familiar motifs. The only truly hindering motif is a light, cascading
percussion one straight from Alan Silvestri's Back to the Future, but
that's more likely a coincidence more than anything else. A boy soprano also
brings back memories of John Debney's End of Days. Young counters
with the use of a very effective Middle Eastern woodwind effect to enhance
the biblical weight of the religious actions on screen. And the underscore,
while dissonant in many sections, is sufficiently interesting to keep the
listener going. If Young hadn't written this score's motifs before, it would
be a four-star effort. ***
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Viewer Ratings and Comments:
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• 1. Introitus (Entrance) (8:07)
• 2. Kyrie Eleison (Lord Have Mercy Upon Us) (11:47)
• 3. Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) (13:05)
• 4. Agnus Dei (Lamb of God) (13:06)
• 5. Lux Aeterna (Eternal Light) (6:45)
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Insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
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