Buy it... if you want to hear the City of Prague Philharmonic's fantastic performance of the Klingon attack music from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and a nicely arranged suite from Star Trek: Nemesis.

Avoid it... if you already own all of the other included performances on the "Space and Beyond" albums and the price of this new set isn't worth 11 minutes of newly recorded music.

The Star Trek Album: (The City of Prague Philharmonic) By 2003, it had been several years since the Silva family of labels had released their last major, critically acclaimed collection of science fiction film music. After the success of their "Space and Beyond" album in 1997, they produced two sequel sets in the series (in 1998 and 2000), both very attractive. Over the course of those three albums, the City of Prague Philharmonic performed nearly every major piece of Star Trek music available at the time, and while most of it appeared on the first album in that series, there were additional piece sprinkled throughout the two follow-up albums. All of these double-CD sets offered interesting performances of the selections, and while some of them were better performed than others, the overwhelming magnitude of available re-recordings from the Prague musicians (along with their always crisp sound quality) remains staggering. Other labels that had recorded Star Trek music on their own various compilations, including the Telarc presentations of Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops and Varèse Sarabande releases of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, had already condensed their Star Trek recordings onto single "final frontier" album offerings. It was only a matter of time before Silva did the same with their own recordings from the franchise, but unlike the other two labels, Silva had already released so many recordings of Star Trek music that two-CD sets were now required to feature all of it. The resulting "The Star Trek Album" contains all of Prague's previous recordings, most of their sound effects, and a couple of new cues to round out a selection from the first ten feature films and four television shows.

The inherent problem with this kind of release, of course, is the same one that exists when Varèse Sarabande or any other label shuffles around their re-recorded selections and releases them again; people who already own the previous releases of these recordings are left wondering if the price of the new set is worth having the minimal, newly offered material. In the case of this product from Silva, Prague offers only two new performances. For details about each of the pre-existing recordings, seek the reviews of Silva's previous products (there's no point in discussing them again in detail here). On the "Space and Beyond" albums, Prague had offered identical performances of all of these other tracks, although it should be noted that there are some gems in that collection. The Prague recordings of the opening titles from Goldsmith's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the overture from Horner's Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the end titles from Goldsmith's Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, and end titles from Eidelman's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (which, unlike other groups' arranged suites, does include the rhythmic Klingon motif) are all superior and highly enjoyable, and most of the other selections are without major mistakes. A number of the performances of the television music represented material that has never been released in original form, though it should be noted that these items had already (for the most part) been recorded by either Prague or other ensembles. If a criticism is to be had with the addition of performances of the more recent Goldsmith scores in the film franchise, it revolves around the fact that all of the suites from the last three films, as well as the fifth, feature the same structure for their end credits; thus, you end up hearing the Goldsmith's fanfare for the original film over and over and over again.

For this new album set, Nic Raine (who regularly does a spectacular job arranging and conducting John Barry material) personally arranged his own suite of themes and noteworthy cues from Star Trek: Nemesis. Not only does this solve the problem of repeat performances of Goldsmith's original end credit suite format, but Raine's arrangement presents the best thematic and action music heard in Star Trek: Nemesis. From the eight-minute suite of this score (including the opening title, the duel between ships at the end, and the emotional variant of Shinzon's theme on woodwind leading into the last portion of the end credits), you'd think that the original score is a masterpiece in the series, and despite the shortcomings of Goldsmith's original recording, the Prague performers whip surprising life into it here. Likewise, the other new recording is also lively. The percussion section brought their silverware to bang on pots and pans for the Klingon attack sequence in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Horner's version Klingon religious feast day, perhaps), a score that had previously been omitted from Prague's Star Trek selections. The addition of these two cues completes the Silva and Prague presentation of Star Trek music and makes for one fine set. If only an instrumental version of the "Enterprise" theme song (or perhaps some other selection of music from that ill-fated production) could have been recorded, the album would still have been a complete survey of the entire franchise until 2009. The sound effects are negligible, never as interesting or true to the shows as Kunzel's similar attempts. The greatest fault of the album is that the cues are, for some reason, not in chronological order of the films and shows. Otherwise, it's a noteworthy set with two fantastic new performances that almost complete the first two ages of "Star Trek" productions. ****