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6/21/01 - Magdalene: (Cliff Eidelman) --All new
review-- "Consider it incredible luck. Breaking into the scoring
business is an incredibly hard task to accomplish, especially for a person
in his young twenties fresh from school. Most aspiring composers are
forced to spent rich amounts of money in order to record demos with a
reasonably sized orchestra before they can be hired. In the case of Cliff
Eidelman, who began his scoring career even before graduating with his
advanced music degree, he was bestowed with an astonishing stroke of luck
when he met in his apartment with the producer and director of
Magdalene. During that conversation, Eidelman told the inquiring
party that a group of seventy performers would be adequate for the heavily
dramatic score. Producer Ernst Ritter von Theumer then responded with the
now famous line, "Why seventy when you can have one hundred and twenty?"
Eidelman was hired shortly thereafter and sent to Europe to compose for
and conduct the Munich Symphony Orchestra. His eventual score would
include a massive orchestral and choral sound, eclipsing most of the
scores he would produce in the next ten years of his career...." **** Read the entire
review.
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6/20/01 - Triumph of the Spirit: (Cliff Eidelman) --All
new review-- "Not many people are familiar with the scores of Cliff
Eidelman from his pre-Star Trek days, but there is no doubt that
Triumph of the Spirit is the strongest of the young composer's
early works. After scoring a string of small releases, Eidelman was
recommended for a composing position of Triumph of the Spirit at a
very young age, only a few years out of his music studies. When presented
with the prospect of working on the true WWII/Auschwitz story, Eidelman
jumped at the opportunity, noting that the film had extended sequences
without dialogue, allowing the score to flourish in emotion for extended
cues. As part of process of creating a few demonstration pieces for the
producers of the film, Eidelman manually researched the instrumentation
and language of the Greek Jewish culture that was depicted in the film,
and this attention to ethnic detail won him the job. Because of the
lengthy sequences without dialogue, Eidelman utilized a large performing
group and chorus to represent the emotional intangibles for the film...."
**** Read the
entire review.
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6/14/01 - Picture Bride: (Cliff Eidelman) --All new
review-- "One of the biggest disappointments in the career of Cliff
Eidleman was the rejected score for Picture Bride, replaced in the
final version of the film by an equivalent score by Mark Adler (who
remains best known in the film score genre with 1988's The Unbearable
Lightness of Being). The Adler score for the film was released on
album at the same time as Eidelman's unused effort, and both scores would
have worked just as well in the film. While some sources of information
indicate that the post production scheduling conflicts of Picture
Bride caused Eidelman to be unable to finish the score, other accounts
of the collapse are less kind to Eidelman's composition. In any case, the
film's location required a flavor of the Far East while also catering to
the ears of Western audiences. Both scores accomplished this task, but
they went about doing so from different directions...." **** Read the entire
review.
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6/10/01 - The Beautician and the Beast: (Cliff Eidelman)
--All new review-- "Nearly a complete failure as a film, one of the
few bright aspects about The Beautician and the Beast is its score
by Cliff Eidelman. The film is a romantic fantasy which revolves around
the outlandish premise that a hairdresser in New York could accidentally
be confused as a tutor for the children of a foreign king, and of course,
the unlikely love the spawns in that situation. Any charm that the film
might have hoped to convey is nearly shattered by the comical dialect of
Fran Drescher, whose voice becomes so intolerable by the end of the film
that it is difficult to hear the music behind it. For the score, the
filmmakers chose to mix a few traditional Eastern Block classical/choral
pieces with the talents of Cliff Eidelman, whose career was looking upward
at the time. Aside from The Beautician and the Beast, which gave
him the opportunity to go to the U.K. to record with the London
Metropolitan Orchestra...." *** Read the
entire review.
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6/5/01 - A Simple Twist of Fate: (Cliff Eidelman) --All
new review-- "A year after his score for Untamed Heart was
partially replaced in the film, Eidelman continued on to another in a
string of character dramas that defined the bulk of his career. The
heartwarming story of A Simple Twist of Fate was a suitable project
for Eidelman, who was in the process of fine tuning his abilities to score
these films of personal stories with emotional depth. The film's subject
matter stands on a serious level, comparable to One True Thing or
Now and Then, with longer passages of more ominous tones than most
of Eidelman's other scores of the period. The wide range of emphasis in
the performances by different sections of the orchestra makes A Simple
Twist of Fate a more diverse effort for Eidelman, and portions of this
score would influence his later rejected score for The Picture
Bride the following year...." *** Read the entire
review.
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6/4/01 - Untamed Heart: (Cliff Eidelman) --All new
review-- "At the height of his early career, Cliff Eidelman began his
streak of scoring heavy character dramas. The film Untamed Heart
was of typical success at the time, with the younger appeal of the film's
stars drawing the most attention. The director of the film, Tony Bill, was
impressed with the early works of Cliff Eidelman, claiming that the young
composer had almost too much talent to describe, and crowning Eidelman as
one of the "best of the new." For the project, the composer would write a
score that would eventually be overshadowed for many in the public by the
use of a Nat King Cole song instead. The score is very typical of
Eidelman's use of a small performing group to build a suffienct emotion
for the film, if not much more. Ironically, the score passed by in the
film without much attention, and it would be hard to tell while watching
it that Eidelman had composed the score...." *** Read the entire
review.
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