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This is your shiny gold OST. Two coats, guaranteed. Shovel your way out of the complete score, and into the abridged album presentation. $29.99, that's right! Only $29.99. Plus shipping.

To be honest, I've never been bothered with socalled microedits. Most of the time, they've been used to create a better musical flow within certain tracks.

The ROTJ OST is awful. Even given that JW was given one LP to work with instead of two, it's bad. So little of the music from the actual movie is on it and a lot of highlights from the score are absent. Lapti Nek isn't even the film version and though I enjoy it for what it is - it's a waste of space on the OST, but I guess that they thought it was going to be sort of a follow up to the original movie's Cantina Band and that it would be popular... Three of the tracks are concert versions of themes barely heard in the movie. That OST is a very very poor representation of the score.

The Peter Pettigrew harpsichord "theme" not being on the POA album also struck me as weird considering its use in the film. I don't think it is even hinted at.

I'm glad this thread got bumped, because I've been meaning to do so myself recently! Mostly just to say, that I freaking love this release sooooooooo much! We've been so blessed in the last decade to get a steady stream of expanded versions of whatever our favorite scores are from the 70s-90s on a regular basis, month after month after month. Often, one becomes a favorite for a while, then a new one comes out, and that one gets the most listens for a while, etc. But this one is different. I've continuously listen to this REGULARLY since it came out, which was 8 MONTHS ago now! I don't think there's been a single week since it came out that I didn't listen to either JP or TLW or both all the way through. This music is all so amazing, especially The Lost World, no matter how many times I listen, I never get sick of it at all. This could very well be my favorite film score release of all time!

was a bit shocked to find Euron was actually Theon's father and that Bran had been in a coma all along and the whole thing from Season 1 Episode 2 onwards has just been going on in his head. Was great to see Sean Bean back!

And i liked the like!

I can't think of a single JW-produced OST that has frustrated me. Quite the contrary, they've all been masterfully presented. Now the expansions, on the other hand....

The Lion in Winter by John Barry: Pretty ace in all departments. Also the tightly spotted score doesn't seem to have a wasted note in it.

Mulan! Aladdin! The Fox and the Hound!

I confess there's been two reasons why I haven't been here as much lately. One, my car CD player is broken, and I won't be able to afford to fix it for a long time. And two, well...I've been kind of hooked on video game music, and I did not wish to invite scorn and mocking for my jovial fondness for this. Because good lord do I love love LOVE David Bergeaud's Ratchet and Clank scores. I can't help it. There's just so many spiritually satisfying tunes in these things.

I will make it legal

So, from time to time, we all bitch and moan about John's bizarre OST presentations, but which ones frustrate you the most? Upon revisiting Azkaban in the car today, I actually rolled my eyes upon reaching Mischief Managed (and no, not because the 12 minute track is an exhausting waste of album space). For some stupid reason I'd psyched myself up to hear the wonderful alternative ending to Buckbeak's Flight at this section, only to realise John reused the same ending as Buckbeak's Flight from earlier in the OST: The film version of the end credits features the alternate ending from the film proper after Harry & Hermione rescue Sirius from the cell atop Hogwarts. Worse still, in a Temple of Doom-esque moment of madness, John microedited the very cool start of the end credits to remove a fun variation on the Double Trouble theme (almost entirely absent from the OST). It got me thinking: which "creative" OST decisions, be it combined tracks, microedits (no shortage of those) or repeated cues, have frustrated you the most? ie. Why Mike Matessino is our savior.

I loved it, but I hear I have shit taste, so take @Sharky's word for it.

Every JW OSTs contain several bad decisions

I guess. I didnt really notice the score. For me it was Deakins superb camerawork.

It's a bland, dreary film with none of the personality of his other films. But in general I don't like crime type movies.

The ROTJ OST is the gold standard.

What about the microedit at the end of Anakin's Dark Deeds? Ironically, he's kept the same edit in subsequent concert arrangements of this same track. Heck, he played it just a few months back at Celebration!

I like LINK, and that's all I have to say, on the matter

There's no mystical energy field controlling my destiny.

I recently downloaded the Tanglewood premiere of Markings from a link somebody shared from YouTube. I also downloaded the May 12, 2016 concert performance by John Williams on the Boston Pops website, as well as the My Fair Lady concert and the James Taylor concert they had available for download on their website. Another on the top of my head is the Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra World Premiere that somebody on this forum shared a link to. But made me realize there are probably a LOT of performances online that I am not aware of. Before I go scouring google for some, I thought I would start a post so others could share their favorites. And when I find something of note, I will contribute as well. I am not interested in any that would be breaking copyright laws or the like, but items available on websites by the proprietary owner or that are on YouTube through legitimate circumstances. Anyway thought it might be a fun topic. Maybe Bespin can start a new catalog of online recordings. So I found a couple other fun things on the BSO website... The premiere of Just Down West Street from 2015 in a nice edited mp3 (just the song, not whole performance) http://bso.http.internapcdn.net/bso/podcasts/images/mp3/tmc75/1_Williams_JustDownWestStreet.mp3 And then the full concert recording of the premiere of Markings. Apologies if these have been shared before. http://streams.wgbh.org/online/clas/bso/bso170716.mp3

So I'm flipping channels and TNG is on, and it's like a 5 minute scene of Picard playing Frère Jacques on flute with a random crew member on keyboard. Is this episode considered bottom rung of the series? Oh boy, now they've gone into a hidden compartment to play together with her roll out keyboard. This is a lot of time to dedicate to this stuff...

Both versions are too different to be compared with another. They're both great. They give the scene a totally different meaning. It's like the delivery of the baby T-rex in The Lost World. With the cue "In the Trailer" the focus would have been on the relationship between the baby T-rex and its parents, without that cue the scene is focused on the pure terrorization of the people in the trailer. In the case of "Binary Sunset" it's either Luke's yearning for more or Luke's discontentment that is described by the music.

Hahaha, I missed that. Yes, that does have a striking resemblance. The problem is the premiere recording of this ballet was the 1996 recording you link to. The ballet had only four performances prior to Star Wars and since it was not recorded until the premiere, it is very unlikely this was anything other than a coincidence unless someone can place JW in London in 1958, 64, 70 or Monte Carlo in 1959. Very few ballets have strong musical structure. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring is a sequence of "tableaux" rather than a long structured whole. They tend to be short vignettes that generally align to the drama (Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker, Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliette, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, etc).

Just listened to the new Robin Hood Legacy Collection Soundtrack on spotify. It's beautiful and feels very nostalgically. Great woodwind composing in this score! Let's hope for many more Legacy Soundtracks in the future

I really like how that whole 14-minute opening piece is almost a 100% self-contained adventure cue. (Except the Raiders March and the Holy Grail foreshadowing, of course.)

That's actually symphony no. 3.

I think it's latter.

I assume with full pilots gear on it wouldn't be easy, but many probably tried. Survival instict. It's different if you're a trained swimmer.

Love how, by the second page of this thread, everybody is already shitting on everything!

"Hey John Williams, can you give me the recording sessions for every film you've ever scored in lossless FLAC?" "Why sure I can, random citizen!"

For emotional attachment, the wistful and sacral grail theme (two actually). The Ark theme is a brilliant herald for ominous forces at work but i just feel no particular affection for it (probably intended).

My hope is that Williams expands on the musical ideas of the Force Awakens and adds more material into the thematic lexicon that feels like a natural continuation of the musical story. While I love the Prequel scores, they are all thematically somewhat fragmented (AOTC being surprisingly the most single-minded of the three) and without much continuation between them aside from the OT themes making cameos in all of them. Rey's theme worked much better in TFA as it was basically the binding thematic idea of the entire story.

I hope reissues are still in the pipeline so all the new fans of these scores have access to legally buy them!

Nah. What I wrote is what he said now. Of course, later, he'll say: "I was happy with what Hans had written, but it was not very good, so we called Gia to provide us with some good music".

Fixed!

Atmospheric film scoring is growing on me, but like anything that requires a skill, not everyone is good at it. It takes a talented dramatist like Zimmer to pull it off. That said, I'm uncomfortable with the symphonic/melodic zealotry and dogma that fuels posts on my Facebook feed and message boards through some people's outright dismissal of modern scoring without giving it a second glance. It reminds me of classical music snobbery, only now the Williams/Goldsmith/Horner fanatics have now become the elitist snobs. They act like they feel threatened or something. And then they act all puzzled when you say it's possible to like both approaches. Sometimes I need some variety in my life, hence listening only to symphonic or melodic scores would send me mad. Also, some of those Filmtracks reviews where otherwise decent Zimmer et al scores barely scrape past a one or two star rating might be due for some reassessment. Were they really that bad? Looking back on them, I just don't agree with those ratings anymore. And the reason I'm singling Filmtracks out is because that tends to be a lot of newcomers' first touchpoint they find in the online film music community, so CC's reviews are bound to influence what people feel is worthy of seeking out.

I listen to composers the same way people listen to singers. To hear a particulier musical voice. That's harder when a score has been assembled by a whole bunch of people accorded to a certain house style.

Under no circumstances are you allowed to taste me.

In the thumbnail, it looks like Williams is having problems with his back.

PBS has uploaded John Williams rehearsing/recording the theme to youtube:

I could watch the behind the scenes stuff like that all day. a superb little video showing Williams at work. edit: it is nice to see that a poll about foul language is generating more interest than both the video and release of a clean version of the work itself.

That's fine. I know that many people count adaptations of this kind as "proper" concert works (like, say, Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé suite). Personally, I see it as a separate thing altogether -- an extension of the score -- and instead require complete originality when I list concert works.