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Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you enjoyed the series on television and wish for the remarkable vocal performances over the opening titles and finale. Avoid it... if you're expecting the same high quality of orchestral underscore that you've heard in other popular Hallmark/Sci-Fi Channel series in recent years. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Earthsea: (Jeff Rona) Attempting to continue drawing on the massive popularity of recent television hits in the fantasy genre such as Children of Dune and The Mists of Avalon, Hallmark Entertainment and the Sci-Fi Channel bring Ursula K. Le Guin's world of Earthsea to the small screen. Known alternatively as The Legend of Earthsea, the magical, medieval fantasy universe created by Le Guin is comparable in its wizardry and sorcery to J.R.R. Tolkien's lengthier Lord of the Rings tales. The basic premise involves a young, talented, but immature wizard who must do everything from control his own powers to reunite humanity and bring world peace. The plot is familiar to fantasy veterans, as are the creatures, locations, and characters. With material taken from the first two books of Le Guin's classic series, the four-hour Hallmark/Sci-Fi Channel production is ambitious in the amount of material it attempts to squeeze into the series, and still omits plotlines that might disappoint fans of the books. Premiering on the Sci-Fi Channel on December 13 and 14, 2004, the series came and went without much of the hype you usually hear about these productions. Since the premieres of The Odyssey and Merlin (both from Hallmark) in the 1997-1998 seasons, these films have typically hit the small screen with much fanfare. With poor reviews and luke warm advertising, Earthsea began faded away not long after its debut. The musical scores for prior fantasy series, from Trevor Jones' Merlin to Lee Holdridge's The Mists of Avalon and Brian Tyler's Children of Dune, have sold very well and remained popular long after their debuts. All have been released on CD by the Varèse Sarabande label, as is Earthsea, but Jeff Rona's product this time around is not as spectacular as in the past. A veteran of television scoring, Jeff Rona is equally experienced in the recording and sampling of various ethnic sounds, and this talent in particular is what interested director Rob Lieberman in hiring Rona for the task. Lieberman requested that Rona write an appropriately epic title theme for the opening of the series, but then advised a more worldly and varied approach for the underscore. The intriguing result, hopefully, would help differentiate Earthsea from the many fantasy series that came before, whether the setting necessitated a Celtic sound, Middle-Eastern flair, or traditional Medieval bombast. Rona's title theme is elegant and impressive, utilizing a simple melody with large-scale orchestral and vocal muscle. The small vocal group has a distinctly African sound that you hear from the Adiemus albums, and despite being an intriguing and distinct sound in and of itself, that group of vocal performers is largely absent from the rest of the score. Aside from some sporadic references, the title theme is also absent from much of the effort, leaving Earthsea to the mass of instrumentally schizophrenic underscore. Rona's work wanders about the landscape of world music, but not in a flamboyant or memorable fashion. In fact, for a series and score supposedly of an epic scope, the score is disappointingly restrained during much of its length. A potentially momentous scene such as "A Lesson Learned" lacks grip in its string theme performance, perhaps due to a lack of inspirational performance by the ensemble or maybe a compositional underachievement. There is practically no action material present (the brass make a notable appearance in "Sailing"), and a moment of horror or enchantment ("The Book of Spells") is tackled with frightfully loud dissonance. The somewhat new age vocal approach that many composers have used for this genre (with even Howard Shore working with Enya for the big screen) is also largely absent here; only in the powerful "Sparrowhawk" and finale "Light Over Earthsea" cue does it make a welcomed intrusion. Overall, Rona's Earthsea gets off to a great start, but stews and stumbled throughout its underscore without clear direction or purpose. Given the vast array of fabulous resources at Rona's disposal, such an uninspired end result is truly unfortunate. On the upside (perhaps) is the fact that a recording with the Slovakia Radio Symphony allowed for an abnormally lengthy Varèse Sarabande album. **
The insert includes a note from the director about the score and film. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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