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Unfortunately, most of the rearrangements, rough edits, and total re-writes forced upon The Black Stallion, despite whatever intelligence it took from the underrated talents of Walker to appease the director, were inferior to Coppola's original score. This downgrade is especially prevalent in the second half of the film, a damning statement given that that initial material was highly flawed in its own tepid tone and mismanagement of themes in the first place. Coppola's music still maintains a majority of screen time in The Black Stallion, and it is simplistic and barely adequate thematic material that struggles to generate and hold an appropriate tone for the story. It's remarkable to consider the underlying strength of the thematic constructs but the careless and completely unenthusiastic manner in which they were conveyed by the Los Angeles musicians. A pretty title theme for the boy/horse relationship, a secondary Arabian-influenced theme for the stallion, and a potentially rousing idea for their riding sequences (as well as a distinct training theme in the second half of the movie) are all well conceived and probably looked great on paper. Somewhere in the translation of that material to performance, all the life was sucked out of the music, leading to a score with the cool warmth of elevator tunes. The title theme is especially strangled by slow pacing, outright boring orchestration, and performances that lack any particularly deep meaning. This lack of emotional engagement is critical to the score's failure, though Ballard's response was to apparently shake the score down to even less dense soundscapes. Although the ambience Coppola set for the film was carried on by the other musicians who wrote additional material, the thematic integrity and instrumental cohesion became lost in the process. While all of the music for the film together sounds reasonably similar, the style that Ballard wanted to hear artificially inserted into some of the running and vista sequences doesn't mesh with Coppola's otherwise understated approach. Genres of music are badly merged, from jazzy piano to slight string waltzes. By the time of the banjo, steel guitar, and harmonica material meant to represent Americana elements in the second half, the score has completely lost any semblance of consistency.

There are individual highlights to be heard in The Black Stallion, however. The rousing fanfare in "The Black Stallion," composed by Walker and Nyle Steiner, is an obvious attempt to infuse the picture with a large, victorious burst of brass, though there was never any way it could possibly work with the preceding cues for the island scenes. The minimalistic scoring of those earlier scenes, led by solo harp and flute, completely loses the fantasy element that Coppola's score had attempted to capture in its entirety. Much of this material sounds almost like documentary music that you'd hear in National Geographic nature shows at the time, scores that made a conscious effort to provide a basic backdrop and avoid any significant emotional impact on the visuals. The cues for the final race and its aftermath provide a glimpse, along with the simply repeated thematic suite as the finale of the score, of how rich Coppola's score could have been if Ballard hadn't sent the musicians back to record over and over again. On either of the score's two official albums, a correct sequencing will give you a very good idea of just how butchered the recording process was in its final weeks. Luckily, for 1983's The Black Stallion Returns, director Robert Dalva and veteran French composer Georges Delerue hit it off immediately. The sequel score's overwhelming and consistent presence in the film further proves the score for The Black Stallion as evidence of how not to treat the music for your production. A 2001 Prometheus album placed both scores together, 35 minutes total from B>The Black Stallion. An impressive 3-CD set from Intrada Records in 2009 offered that same original album presentation but also two CDs of the complete score with many alternate and unused takes. Although the best treatment of the score possible, that 2009 product (limited to only 1,500 copies) only served to expose the extremely troubled evolution of a score that ultimately had no chance to form a cohesive whole in the picture. It's a prime example of a promising, but ultimately underachieving, fragmented soundtrack that is carried by the strength of the other production elements. Skip the expensive collectable of 2009 and try instead to satisfy yourself with the 2001 double-score album, which is worth its price for the Delerue sequel score alone.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download