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Dances With Wolves on DVD
• "Beautiful Score" • Dolby Digital 5.1 More DVD info... |
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Dances With Wolves on DVD
• "Beautiful Score" • Dolby Digital 5.1 More DVD info... |
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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... the 2004 expanded album if you have never owned Dances With Wolves before, or if you believe that this score was the easily the best of John Barry's career. Avoid it... any of the expanded albums if the original 53-minute 1990 album satisfies all of your needs for a score that has saturated the ears of many listeners. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Arguably the best of the themes is the journeying theme (associated with Fort Sedgewick), which can be heard primarily in the third track. Barry, in a curious composing manner, sometimes manages to write a small, secondary theme for his assignments that is actually better than the main theme for a film... and Dances With Wolves is no exception. This is not to discredit the John Dunbar theme, though. Any person who watches American football on television immediately recognized it mixed in during the United Way commercials for over ten years. As previously published by Jerry McCulley with great accuracy, "Utilizing Wagnerian structure, Barry's three main themes recur in magisterial symphonic form. The memorable "John Dunbar" theme alone has become an almost subconscious part of modern life, utilized as Muzak and underscore for public events great and small. Barry's skills as an arranger color his themes in subtly shifting orchestral hues, giving even the most repeated melodic passages new emotional weight. Barry's rich music is living proof that the art of orchestral film scoring is still alive and surprisingly vital in the '90s." Barry chose to score the film from Dunbar's point of view, dismissing any idea of recording authentic Sioux music and instead taking a strictly symphonic approach on a massive scale. Cynics have raised the point that Barry's only attempt at Native American music (White Buffalo) was by no means a success --in fact, many would consider it a monumental failure in his career-- and that Barry would have been incapable of any other type of score than the one he wrote. And yet, his approach worked wonders, and today, many of the tracks from the score have been re-recorded by various recording groups for other labels. The last recording of the 1990's came from the City of Prague Philharmonic, who performed the film version of the "Buffalo Hunt" sequence in stunning surround sound (available on the Silva Screen label). Again, however, the powerful journeying theme has remained unfortunately neglected in the majority of the re-recordings so far. The original recording by Barry has had its own long story on album. Several releases of the score are available. The original release that accompanied the film's popularity in 1990 contains all the necessary music, and is readily available many years later. The Gold release of Dances With Wolves in 1995 (the "Definitive Collector's Edition,") was one of a string of "gold" releases made available for highly popular, best-selling scores (eventually including Schindler's List and Apollo 13). This (supposedly) limited gold release has three additional tracks of music, none of which appear directly in the film. The last two tracks are pop versions of the themes from the film. The first one, encompassing the John Dunbar and journeying themes, is quite nice, but the second one is a rather awkward combination of James Bond style and John Dunbar substance. These two cues are the same tracks contained on a promo circulated to radio stations for mass appeal. The third previously unreleased track (at least on Dances With Wolves CDs, that is) is the "Fire Dance" track from the Narada album, Last Frontier, and it is very misplaced in the middle of Barry's score. In 2004, as part of a celebration of Barry's 70th birthday, Sony released Dances With Wolves once again, removing the pop tracks and featuring about twenty minutes of previously unreleased material and alternate versions of famous cues that were also previously unavailable in original form. The extended material is sprinkled through the album with a few negligible extra minutes in existing cues. The full film versions of the "Buffalo Hunt" and "John Dunbar Theme," as well as an extension of the love theme in "Falling in Love," are welcomed additions. Unless you are a serious John Barry collector, however, this expanded album may not offer you much more satisfaction than the gold one from 1995. Despite the press stating that the 2004 Sony album is the "entire" score, Barry reportedly recorded 100 minutes of music for Dances With Wolves, and thus it is likely not complete. Sadly, if you put all of the pop and other alternate versions of this music together on one set, it would have to encompass two CDs. No matter which version you find and enjoy, Dances With Wolves remains the crowning achievement in Barry's career, and stands as a score of historical and popular influence for an entire generation. *****
* Previously unreleased
* Previously unreleased ** Contains previously unreleased material
On the 1995 gold release, the pop tracks (20 and 21) were reorchestrated by Barry and released in 1991. Track 11 ('Fire Dance') was also released initially in 1991. The gold CD packaging features a slip cover and different artwork on the insert The CD itself is 24-Karat Gold and the sound is a "20-Bit Digital Transfer using Sony's new "Super Bit Mapping" (SBM) Process." The 2004 album contains expanded notes about the score, but a return to traditional packaging. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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