Buy it... if you have the 1997 album and seek a significantly better product in the 2003 expanded edition, especially in regards to the bold theme for the Tigerfish submarine.

Avoid it... if you are rightfully suspicious of any action score that has the name Michel Legrand on it, and you're not interested in paying higher prices for only ten minutes of outstanding music.

Legrand

Ice Station Zebra: (Michel Legrand) Taking advantage of cold war tensions between America and the Soviets, author Alistair MacLean wrote many of the most popular war and espionage stories of the 1960's and 1970's, a handful of which were translated onto the big screen. While not at all the most successful, Ice Station Zebra was a heroic and entertaining 1968 adaptation of a submarine adventure plot. Plagued by early production problems, the venture eventually became one of the better submarine movies of the Silver Age and beyond, netting Oscar nominations for cinematography and special effects. The ship's race to a remote outpost at the North Pole represented a story that served as a bridge between the plethora of World War II submarine stories and those that fueled a resurgence of interest in the topic in the 1990's. The choice of composer for Ice Station Zebra was, however, not a name you would have expected at the time. Michel Legrand was known best (and by many people, known only) for his romantic pop and jazz scores, for which he was often nominated for Academy Awards. Legrand, however, was himself a fan of action films, and he took the task of scoring this large scale action feature with delight and vigor. Because his scores were often for smaller, less complicated ensembles, he orchestrated all of his own compositions. With seventy-five musicians for this project, Legrand would spend sleepless nights translating his themes and motifs into a score that would stretch from the first to last minute of the film, and every minute in between. The result of his efforts were a score with two better than average themes (one of which would go down in submarine score history as a fan favorite), but a lengthy series of less interesting material that exposes, perhaps, Legrand's lack of experience in the genre. The film is floated by the two themes; the first is a somewhat sweeping, romantic overture piece to represent the highly developed characters of the film. The second, though, is the theme that most fans adopted as the title theme, and that is the repeating four-note motif for the Americans' Tigerfish submarine. It plays prominently during several key sequences in the film, and especially maximizes its impact during the loaned footage of the Tigerfish leaving for the open seas early in the story ("loaned" because the American Navy opted not to give the filmmakers footage of a genuine nuclear sub).

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In between these thematic bursts is an enormous amount of dense, suspenseful underscore. Legrand's handling of these cues is adequate for the occasion, but he continuously inserts disharmony into many situations, often with woodwinds and a vibraphone, that causes the underscore to become difficult to digest outside of the film's excellent story. A fair amount of tension in the plot translates into extended substandard and predictable performances of slightly atonal atmosphere. Even during the main thematic sequences, it seems that Legrand was intent on taking a harmonious structure and inserting one or two awkwardly wandering instruments into the mix, likely to accentuate the complicated international implications of the ensuing race to the station. This counterpoint places the score at an imbalance between thematic beauty and effective dissonance, and it unfortunately causes several cues to lose their potential power both in film and on album. These techniques may also cause the score to sound more dated to ears accustomed to the adventure music of the Digital Age. Nevertheless, because of a lack of transfer of Ice Station Zebra to the digital realm for a significant time, the Tigerfish theme alone was considered a top "most wanted" item on album for a lengthy time. An LP record release, followed thirty years later by an identical CD release from P.E.G. in 1997, offered key cues, but only amounted to 30 minutes in total length. The P.E.G. album was snatched up quickly by fans in 1997, though they were presented with sound quality that seemed as though somebody had recorded the score from two rooms away and the product featured strange packaging that transposed a backwards American flag on the cover (that's what happens with you invert the artwork without watching what you're doing). A limited 2003 Film Score Monthly album (in the Silver Age Classic series) replaced the badly packaged and incredibly poorly engineered P.E.G. album with a crisp-sounding, rearranged, and well presented Ice Station Zebra, finally translating the original five-channel stereo recording from master elements for our enjoyment. While in 2003, Tigerfish fans finally had an excellent treatment of this score, it's still questionable if almost 80 minutes of this score is truly necessary. A 50 to 60 minute remastered album may have been best, given that some of Legrand's suspense cues are difficult to handle on their own. But you can't discount the restoration effort put forth by FSM, and the improvement in sound quality is alone worth the price of the album for enthusiasts of the film and genre.   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Music as Written for Film: ***
Music as Heard on 1997 P.E.G. Album: **
Music as Heard on 2003 FSM Album: ****
Overall: ***