 |
|
 |
|
 | |||||||||
| • | Newest Major Reviews: | . | • | This Week's Most Popular Reviews: | • | Best-Selling Albums: | ||
| . |
1. Nim's Island 2. The Life Before Her Eyes 3. Horton Hears a Who! 4. Leatherheads 5. The Spiderwick Chronicles | . | . |
1. Moulin Rouge 2. Gladiator 3. POTC: Curse of the Black Pearl 4. Star Wars: A New Hope 5. Edward Scissorhands |
6. Pearl Harbor 7. Schindler's List 8. Titanic 9. Braveheart 10. Home Alone | . | . |
1. Varèse Sarabande 25th 2. The Last of the Mohicans 3. Legends of the Fall 4. Schindler's List 5. LOTR: Return of the King (Set) |
 | ||||||||
|
|
|
Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... if you want to hear a fascinating and melodic venture by Goldsmith into the realm of strong synthesized and symphonic collaboration. Avoid it... if you saw the American version of the film and liked what you heard, because that wasn't Goldsmith's score. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Through careful reconstruction, Goldsmith fans can hear his effort in a re-ordered and complete-as-necessary form on the Silva label. What you hear on this album is what the film sorely needed. Goldsmith's score is lyrical and thematically beautiful. Sensitive in its attitude and fantastically evocative in it use of melody to soften the characters at the heart of the faerie tale, the Legend score is rich with texture and choral majesty. The thematic battle between good and evil is masterfully matched to the attempts by the Dark Lord to reign in the film. Instead of resorting to several motifs throughout the score, Goldsmith establishes the central faerie tale theme and simply elaborates on different sections of that theme to represent other characters and locations in the film. The performance of the National Philharmonic Orchestra is dynamic and precise, with the endless electronic supplements mixed with skill. The only detraction from the Legend score is the crashing glissando, or wobbly electronic pulse that jabs at the listener several times near the beginning of the score as dark events are suddenly foreshadowed in the film. These "oiya-oiyu, oiya-oiyu" noises (as opposed to the hard "doyng!" noises in the original Star Trek score) often interrupt Goldsmith's best thematic statements and nearly ruin the integrity of those cues. Aside from those bizarre blasts of the synthesizer, Goldsmith's electronics match the eerie setting well. Countering the brass-heavy battle sequences, which often match the best that the composer has presented in scores such as Poltergeist and Total Recall, are the soft vocal performances of the angels and central female character. The "My True Love's Eyes" lullaby is eternal proof that Goldsmith is young at heart and could, conceivably, have made an entire career out of lyrical children's film scores. The construction of the score is completed by a suite-like wrap-up of all the extended themes in a remarkably enjoyable "Re-United" cue at the end of the film. Of course, this tells just half of the story. The earth-shattering event that was avoided in the European release of the film was experienced by Goldsmith fans when the score was entirely dumped for the film's subsequent American release. The single man responsible for this decision at Universal was then-executive Sydney Jay Sheinberg, who is the idiot known for making some of the most disasterous decisions for the studio in the 1980's (also replacing Kamen's score for Brazil and blessing the production of Howard the Duck). Sheinberg decided that the film needed more appeal to teenagers and thus oversaw editing of the film himself (in MTV style) so that it included more kissing and other sexual material. He commissioned the German electronic group Tangerine Dream to rescore the film in haste, figuring that their score for Risky Business had enhanced a previous Tom Cruise film and the same could result again. What Tangerine Dream provided was electronically and thematically inferior compared to Goldsmith's symphonic/synthetic hybrid effort, and the members of Tangerine Dream themselves would become frustrated when Sheinberg would mutilate their score in the film as well. Ironically, when the film was beefed up in length for American television, scenes with Goldsmith's score from the European version ended up alongside scenes with Tangerine Dream music, making for the ultimate experience in film score failure and embarrassment. After Sheinberg's foolish actions, Legend was a total failure in America, seizing neither teenagers nor families. Part of this failure was no doubt due to the removal of Goldsmith's score. On album, all of the Legend music is widely available. The Tangerine Dream score was released by Varese Sarabande on an early CD in 1985 and re-issued in the same form in 1985. The Goldsmith Legend score has been released several times on CD. An original German CD was pressed in 1986 with the identical contents as the English LP release (which contained ten tracks and about 45 minutes of score). When the Silva Screen label returned to the project for a CD release in 1992, their original intent was to just re-issue the same content in remastered form with better packaging. But upon a mix-up with master tapes and the discovery of superior sounding alternative master copies, Silva produced a full, 70-minute album in excellent quality. This album remained in circulation (as an import in the United States) until it began becoming difficult to find around the year 2000. It was originally advertised by Varese Sarabande that they would release a "Deluxe Edition" of Goldsmith's Legend in December, 2000, but then backtracked when Silva retained the rights. Then, in 2002, Silva finally re-issued the album once again (with new artwork, but the same contents as the 1992 one) for total commercial circulation and this album remains in print and readily available. While the 2002 edition claims to have better sound quality than all the others, the 1992 edition has a very good balance of clarity and resonance itself. Either will satisfy Goldsmith fans. Overall, Legend was a fascinatingly doomed project from which an excellent Goldsmith score has emerged and lived on, apart from its disgraced film. ****
* previously unreleased # lyrics by John Bettis
The 1986 German album has sparse packaging, but both Silva albums are overflowing with extra details about the film and score. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
