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7/29/01 - A Special Audio Tribute to Richard Band has been
established on the composer's Up and
Down promotional album review page at Filmtracks. Band is a
veteran of scoring in the television and CD-ROM game genres, with notable
TV show credits which include Buffy, The Vampire Slayer, 7th
Heaven, Stargate SG-1, Walker: Texas Ranger, Dawson's
Creek, and Hyperion Bay. Also prominent in his career is
cartoon scoring, highlighted by his yearly title themes for Warner
Brothers Hoopla. To celebrate the illustrious career of Richard Band,
Filmtracks now offers twenty short audio clips from his two-CD promotional
album, released last year by SuperTracks. Click here and enjoy!
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7/28/01 - The Conversation: (David Shire) "'He'd kill us if
he had the chance.' ...The most memorable line from one of the very best
films of the early 1970's, the Francis Ford Coppola thriller starring Gene
Hackman and a young Harrison Ford. It is a film for which sound editing
was paramount, because the plot of Coppola's story revolves around a
private investigator (Hackman) whose life is completely consumed in the
controlled environment of his eavesdropping technologies. The story and
its characters are gut-wrenching in their sorrow, malice, and
determination, and the film has a whopper of twist at the end that will
likely leave you feeling as though you've been had. Technologically, the
sound elements are the most complex feature of the film. David Shire,
brother-in-law of Coppola, was approached to score the film at a time in
his career when he was looking for a big break. When first learning of the
opportunity to score The Conversation, Shire was sure that the
Coppola film would afford him a big budget to score for a large orchestra,
and his career would take off. When he learned that Coppola wanted the
entire score to be performed by one instrument, Shire was
shocked...." *** Read the entire
review.
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7/24/01 - Captain Corelli's Mandolin: (Stephen
Warbeck) "Working together once again, composer Stephen Warbeck and
director John Madden, who were awarded Academy Awards for film and score
for their 1998 Shalespeare in Love, have set out on a rather
unusual course of action for their latest collaboration, Captain
Corelli's Mandolin. The film adaptation of the novel has been a long
time in production, and it is one of the rare cases in which the score was
conceived of before the primary shooting of the film even began. Madden
and Warbeck have gotten to the point in their work together where both are
directly and equally involved in the final vision of the film. Because the
music in the story of Captain Corelli's Mandolin (and not just that
of the mandolin itself... the story also includes quite a bit of dancing
to guitars and the likes, as well as operatic vocals) is pivotal, Madden
decided to unleash Warbeck on the composition of the primary themes of the
score first so that the editing and cinematography would correspond with
the music, and not vice versa...." *** Read the
entire review.
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7/23/01 - The Film Music of Jerry Goldsmith: (Telarc
Compilation) "Not until the late 1990's did Jerry Goldsmith's conducting
career really begin to flourish, when he slowed his pace of composing new
scores and spent a larger portion of his time conducting recordings of his
own (or other classic composers') pieces for straight-to-album
release. Tickets to his concerts in the United States and United Kingdom
are a hot item, especially since "Goldsmith Conducting Goldsmith" concerts
don't occur as frequently as his fans would probably want. Like John
Williams, Goldsmith has arranged several of his best known and favorite
film score themes into suites that can be performed by nearly any
orchestra. While this excludes performances of his powerful electronic
efforts from the 1980's, it also allows originally small scale score
recordings to be heard with the full force of groups such as the London
Symphony Orchestra. Also to be reckoned with is the lack of noteworthy
solos from the original recordings in his concert works. Safe to say,
though, if you go to see and hear a Goldsmith concert, you will most
likely find it to be nearly identical to the contents of this newest
Goldsmith compilation album from Telarc International...." **** Read the
entire review.
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7/16/01 - The June/July, 2001, Theme of the Month has been
an in-depth review of the career of upstart composer Cliff Eidelman. All
of Eidelman's commercially available scores on CD have now been reviewed
at Filmtracks. To cap off the concentration on his work, a Filmtracks Cliff
Eidelman Tribute has now been established. Included in this tribute is
a short biography, overview of his career, quotation about everyone's
favorite sci-fi franchise, and audio from his Tempest concert piece
as well as a rarely heard Czech performance of his Star Trek VI
suite. Eidelman is confirmed as having produced the score for the upcoming
film, An American Rhapsody, which will be released in the U.S. by
Paramount on August 10th. This film represents Eidelman's first feature
film score in two years, and follows a series of work completed conducting
the RSNO for performances of classic film music.
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7/4/01 - Filmtracks has just moved to a new server! If you
are reading this On Cue entry, then that means you are being served from a
significantly faster Filmtracks machine. The interactive sections of the
site (the viewer comments, ratings, scoreboard, etc) have grown to such
popularity that they were causing too much stress on our old server from
2000. So with this new machine, we hope to get through to 2003 before
needing another upgrade. We thank you for your patience during the
momentary downtime that accompanied this move over the past few days. Some
comments and votes on the review title pages were lost if they were posted
on 7/3/01 or 7/4/01, but otherwise, all other content has been
transferred. And to all you Americans, happy Independence Day! Get out
your noisemakers and wake up thy neighbors!
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