Pike would travel to Germany to conduct the Munich Symphony Orchestra himself for Star Kid, and the resulting score is surprisingly rich and well-developed considering the circumstances. Pike's writing evokes all the heroics of the large-scale fantasy/sci-fi scores of the 1980's without ever falling into the trap of regurgitating variants of famous scores for this new work. His themes are harmonic, pleasing, and appropriate in every sense, often set to slight, militaristic rhythms also typical in the genre. He spreads the wealth around in the ensemble, too, passing themes with ease through the sections in a competent fashion. What's interesting about a somewhat generic selection of pieces as we have here is that Star Kid is the type of score that would seem to have looked much better on paper than heard in its final rendering. Pike pushes all the right buttons throughout the score, offering several cues that could stand well in concert performances, and you can't help but get the feeling that a film as potentially dumb as Star Kid has no right to music of this conceptual size. And yet, the weakness of Pike's music is that it doesn't reach the level of excitement that you'd expect from writing of this quality for a fully orchestral ensemble. There are no obvious mistakes in the physical performances of the music, but there's something stale about those performances that causes Star Kid to lose steam. The recording quality is not to be blamed, for each element is well balanced and a fair amount of wetness is provided on album. The transparent, tonal construct of the score may simply cause the ensemble to sound smaller than it actually is. The same phenomenon happens to Frederic Talgorn's music for the fantasy genre; you simply wish to hear a larger ensemble tackle the score. Overall, it's admirable and pleasant, but rather generic in its realization. The album release contains two obnoxious rock songs at the outset, the latter of which is marginally listenable.  ***   @Amazon.com: CD or Download