Leaderboard

John Williams will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic on November 3 & 4, 2018 (one week after the London concert), according to the orchestra's official websites: Saturday, November 3, 3:30pm https://www.musikverein.at/en/concert/eventid/37570 https://www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/konzerte/konzertdetail/event-id/ 9889 Sunday, November 4, 11am https://www.musikverein.at/en/concert/eventid/37569 https://www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/konzerte/konzertdetail/event-id/ 9890 Concert Program (approx. 2hrs) Vienna Philharmonic John Williams, conductor Johannes Moser, cello Suite from Close Encounters of the Third Kind Suite from Memoirs of a Geisha Adventures on Earth from E.T. A Child’s Tale, Suite from The BFG Scherzo for Motorcycle and Orchestra from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade The Rebellion is Reborn from The Last Jedi Princess Leia´s Theme from Star Wars The Throne Room and Finale from Star Wars (Cellist Johannes Moser's website also mentions "Elegy for Cello and Orchestra" as part of the program) Both performances will be recorded for TV broadcast. Ticket information not yet available. (Thanks to Flip Jansen from Movies in Concert)!

Even in these few seconds you can tell this guy is the real deal.

It's like.... like.... Like he knows how to write for orchestra

Yeah. The music is clear and sonorous. Self assured. And it moves wonderfully, doesn't it? It is in motion with the film, and you feel in motion with it. That's something I don't hear many composers do anymore, at least not many of the ones who are working very regularly - just the few remaining masters, Newman, JNH, Zimmer, etc., and of course Williams. All that busy ostinato stuff and drums banging and flighty woodwinds and percussion sections with 15 players (I'm looking at you, almost every new piece of symphonic concert music) yet no real movement. But this flows, and gracefully. Like somebody said, it's balletic. I may actually see the film despite little other interest.

I hope they have a better backup system than Thor.

From John Powell's Instagram: "In addition to John Williams’ brilliant tune for Han, I got five new themes + many other motifs/riffs joining the Galaxy Far, Far Away in Solo: A Star Wars Story! 🎺😎🎺Now.. guess/discuss! :)"

This is getting out of hand, now there are two of us!

Obviously all of this is subjective. For example, I really dislike both the sound and the playing on TFA, which was LA and SONY, compared to the LSO and Abbey Road. That said, there are some definite highlights of these new mixes, but like any project where they rebuild something fundamentally new from something old, it's going to sound different, and that difference is jarring, wether it's better or worse. A big challenge for SW and ESB, especially, is that they were originally recorded in an old fashioned way for movies, and in the case of SW, the orchestra was comparatively smaller. But there is probably a mandate from somewhere (either Disney, or JW himself) to try and make the 6 scores all sound as consistent to one another as possible. In 1977 and 1980, movies were still being shown in big movie palaces where the theater itself added reverb to the sound, so the music was recorded dry and tight. Home video didn't really exist, certainly not home theaters. If you listen to the 2-disc JAWS set, the movie versions all sound more like the SW/ESB sound and the album versions all sound more like the Asteroid Field on this new mix. The original JAWS LP was all rerecorded, if I understand correctly, at a different studio with a different engineer, than the film versions. I think a deceptive element to the 2005 bonus DVD is that (A) it's in surround sound, and (B) it's got DIA/SFX over it. The surround sound can really bring flatter, dryer mixes to life by enveloping you in subtle spacial effects, as well as using compression in a more aggressive way without it being as obvious. In addition, once you put dia and sfx on top, it puts the music in a context that makes it's trickier to judge on its own. On top of all that, I can tell you from direct evidence that Lucasfilm is a mess when it comes to the archiving of the scores. No one took the time, especially with SW and ESB, to properly catalog everything and retain the elements. Lucasfilm had to buy a multi-track reel of SW music from Ebay just to get it back a few years ago! Their "official" archive of TPM, for example, was distressingly patchwork, with elements from the OST and UE being the only things they had for certain cues, and other cues, like "Up The Wires", missing entirely. ROTS was the only score of the original 6 to be seemingly properly archived. My guess is that Disney would have preferred to release proper complete versions of the scores, but that JW insisted on the original albums. Disney and Lucasfilm seem to be going to great lengths to comply with his wishes after the music issues on Rogue One. I wouldn't be surprised if, much like the original 3 films coming out after GL shuffles off this mortal coil, we'll see complete scores come out once JW has joined the choir eternal. I also would not be surprised if, as a result of all the live concerts being done of the original 3 movies, new recordings might be made of the scores, at least as they appear in the films...

Well, we know there are better masters for those lousy sounding tracks - the original album mix. Therefore, it's very likely a screwup.

I'd like to describe my impression. First of all I know nothing about sound mixing but I play several instruments and would describe myself as an audiophile. ;-) and yes, some edits are really terrible, no doubt about that. But moving on to sound mixing: It's my strong believe that one's taste regarding sound mixing is heavily shaped by one's listening experience. To put it simply: you tend to like what you hear the most or what you grew up with. Well, maybe just kitchen sink philosophy. But I noticed that speaking of sound mixing / sound quality (not necessarily musical quality) my favorite John Williams OSTs are Hook, Home Alone 2 and Jurassic Park. I dont think it's a coincidence that they are all from the early 90s. The sound quality and mixing changed over the years (obviously) and for example I really dont like the sound of TinTin and KOTCS. So in the end, to me, it's really a question of taste and personal preferences. That being said, I don't like this new mixing, especially TPM. It sounds very crisp, very pure, but also quite steril. Feels like they deconstructed the whole thing and put it back together, track by track. Feels like you can hear every single track very clear now, with every little details. Which CAN be quite interesting, but I miss a good blending. Call it a certain muddyness that I'd prefer. It's gone. To me it sounds too perfect. The choir in Duel of the fates sounds clearer, more crisp, but also less voluminous.

Speaking of the booklet for a moment, John Williams name immediately stuck out and not in a good way.

I like AOTC quite a bit actually. Out of all the prequels it actually had a well assembled album. And there's a certain elegance with which Williams constructed so many extended pieces for this film. They might sometimes sound bit removed from everything else but at least there's something unique about them. Karol

I remember reading something when the Rhino Superman CD came out that JW tended to be very much involved in the performance of the score and the editing of the album and outside of that he didn't seem to care as much, say, about fidelity or archiving of every single take. I mean, the conductor's scores from Superman The Movie can't be found anywhere! The Debney cd had to be reorchestrated from the sketches! I think another factor is that to him this is all just his job and he's written so much music in his life that I don't think he believes every single note he's written is at all precious. I think he has the albums and the concert versions and to him those are the landmark things, everything else is sort of nuts-and-bolts workmanship that regular people wouldn't be interested in. Goldsmith was the same way, he actively prevented scores from being released in their entirety, preferring instead a tastefully edited album to a head-to-toe archival presentation (i.e. the 1995 ST:TMP cd) Look at how JW wanted the LLL CE3K album to be assembled vs. how we JWFAN's like to have things done. I think that says a lot.... Also, I don't think they had any idea they'd ever want to go back and revisit this stuff, especially SW and ESB. I don't think they imagined 7.1 surround and 192/24 audio files. I think they thought "There's the movie and there's the LP" and that's it. The music of the Beatles has a similar thing - the early albums had things committed to tape in a way that makes any real remixing kind of impossible, because they thought, who would ever want to go back and remix these things in stereo or have separation for a "Rock Band" video game? They didn't have video games in 1962! You're crazy, it's terrific (i mean that kindly, not troll-ish-ly)

Shore-ly you can't be serious!

I saw Basic Instinct first....

No.

Karol

If that clip didn't feature any thematic callbacks, I assure you they'd be complaining. "I can't believe Chewie sat down, yet Luke's theme didn't play! What a wasted oppurtunity."

This release is a disappointment. I just got 5 of the 6 CDs. ANH is Tuesday? To me it is just a sloppy mess. The lazy covers should have been the first clue. On my way home I listened to the 2016 Sony release of “The Asteroid Field”, as the new 2018 remaster was getting the worst reviews on here, then popped in the 2018 CD once I got home and it doesn’t sound right at all. Things are pushed back in the mix and it just sounds awful like they didn’t finish balancing it. The 2016 release was fine to me. I know more can be pulled out of the LSO performance with proper remastering but this is not that. It baffles the mind that Empire the one I wanted the most as it was the first time the double album was going to be properly released on CD is the most screwed up. How is it that THE MOST IMPORTANT film score series of all time has had the greatest difficulty getting released properly? Don’t get me started on the terrible Indiana Jones releases from 2008. Spent weeks pitch adjusting those tracks which I could not have done without the help of the fine folks on this site. Sorry for the rant but this release pisses me off.

Wow, that little Powell clip sounds AWESOME!! It has a surprisingly lush, romantic, and joyful spirit. I think Powell is gonna knock this out of the park.

It is time for my grand FSM foreshadow moment: "I really like Powell's score to Solo, but I think that Williams's theme for Han is the weakest part. I wish that Kennedy had not been so disrespectful and forced the theme on Powell. Complain, moan, complain."

It is used when Luke and R2 reunite. But yeah I see that as more of a "Star Wars" moment than a "Luke" moment. Reminded me more of the way that it's quoted in TFA when we see Han and Chewie again. Yeah, I'd agree with this. I think that it's Luke's theme in the OT because Luke is the protagonist. Those three movies are "Star Wars, or: The Adventures of Luke Skywalker" In the prequels and sequels, the theme is still relevant for heroic moments or little fun things, just as a little flag to wave for anything Williams might consider particularly Star Wars-y. It's almost an instinctive thing. One example of that in TLJ is when he throws it in as you see Finn, Rose, and DJ exit the First Order laundromat (??) in their undercover uniforms. It's not really tying itself to anything specific, but just saying "Ahh yes, the heroes going undercover. Typical Star Wars!"

Obviously the real HS theme is going to be way more dissapointing

That's not quite correct. He didn't add new bars, that's true, but of course it's not simply a transposed version. If you rearrange a violin concert piece for cello you can't just transpose every other instrument, certain (maybe subtle) changes in the orchestration have to be made. Just saying. ;-) I personally love this version very much. It really hit me. Not a huge fan of solo violin anyway, to confess.

Motivic connections have to be much clearer to be significant, and are typically intended to be actively heard by the audience ~ Ludwig (Paraphrased)

Wonderful stuff! It sounds so crisp and beautifully orchestrated. Powell has always had a knack for creating the same sort of effortless, bright balletic feel that JW does so well. Thank god it doesn’t sound like the orchestra is in the last stages of elephantiasis.

Yeah, Powell has a thing for holst. Perhaps you have heard this cue, but yeah, i just share it anyway:

I've always thought of "Han Solo Returns (At the Court of Jabba the Hutt)" as a love theme for Han's courtship of Jabba.

Yeah, I think that is who it is.

There’s a lot of interesting parallels between the making of Jaws 2 and Damien: Omen II. 1978. Both troubled productions that fired their directors for similar reasons, originally conceptualized as more psychological/cerebral than outright horror, and eventually hiring directors considered to be more of the journeymen variety who ultimately delivered what the studios wanted. While I do like both films, my favorite shots in each were leftovers from the original directors: the fin in the harbor at dusk, and Damien’s entrance framed in fire at the Thorn estate.

Got mine yesterday. Impressions after listening to everything once (and the stuff from the final episodes twice): 1. The first one and a half discs seem like more of the same after S8, and I rarely play anything but the theme and one or two other tracks from that set. 2. The Ashildr stuff sounds like at least the brass is 100% quite synthy synth? Kinda ruins what otherwise seems like nice music. 3. The final episodes are in a different class, with Gold at his usual dramatic and emotional strength. 4. Heaven Sent really is a unique score in the series, just as the episode is unique in its own way. Good to see that Gold really took the time to carry that over to the music. 5. The Shepherd's Boy is a Gold classic, in his special way that gets dangerously close to becoming too poppy and cheesy but never does, because the emotional heart of the cue is genuine. Some of the best Who pieces are made that way. 6. The special sounds fun, too. 7. Very odd sequencing, they could have either included much more, or put everything on fewer CDs. Judging from #1, if the reason is that Gold either didn't have the energy/time, or simply no longer the interest or inspiration to come up with something more engaging for "regular" episodes, perhaps it's really the right choice to leave and let a new composer take over. But I'll still miss him. 8. I like the dedication. "For Maisie. The one and only."

So I take it none of those discs are actually worth buying? The last edition I bought of SW scores were the RCA sets. As lacking as they might be, at least you can tell they were a labor of love. Karol

Wow...he is really keen on travelling now. Can't wait for his inevitable concert aboard the International Space Station!

Well, yeah, senior lesbians!

Would you rather he play Hans Zimmer?

Murder on the Orient Express (2017) Utterly dreadful. What happened to you, Ken? You used to show such promise.

I think they mixed the choir too loud in the mix in Anakin vs. Obi-wan during the choral statement of the Force Theme. Comparing the original, the theme is less defined because of the mix here. There's also a jarring cut in the Battle Over Coruscant section.

Yeah, I think the takeaway is that the Prequels sound really great, it's just the take choices and some bad editing that lets them down. The OT, particularly TESB and partly ROTJ, sound quite badly constructed.

I would say the workaround answer for that would be that she characterized the Gringotts goblins as sort of amoral so I don't think they gave a shit lol. I think there was a lot of "don't ask, don't tell" type stuff going on with how they ran that bank. Dumbledore and Bellatrix both had high security vaults for example. One good, one evil.

Whoops! I gave that a like before you changed it to reference me. I'll change it to a thanks instead. Didn't even realize I'd said something like that. Well, at least I'm consistent!

Honestly the theme would have to be instantly be a classic and one of the greatest things people have heard in film music not to underwhelm. Whether it was by John Williams or John Powell, you're asking people to suddenly accept this new musical identity for a character that has already existed in people's minds for 40 years. It's almost worse that it's Williams since with Powell, you could say it doesn't really count. By the end of this month we're gonna know what 86-year-old John Williams thinks Han Solo sounds like and that's...weird. I think to some degree we're all gonna be like "K" when we hear it. It's gonna be a tune like any other tune. Hopefully a pretty good one.

"Luke's First Crash" (or "Beneath the AT-AT") portion from track 12 "Rebels at Bay" seems to follow the same screw up from "Asteroid Field" and "Battle in the Snow", with some kind of weird processing (noise reduction?) applied to the right channel but not on the left channel. I was thinking just now that those screwed up tracks, "Asteroid", "Snow" and "Crash" have a faint 19kHz signal present on the left channel (the one that escaped the processing). Chris Malone mentions in his document that for the 93 Anthology, not only the cues were sourced from, at best, 1/4" 4 track tapes, but they have that 19kHz signal. He also mentions that for the 97 SE, the 24 track tapes that contained the 2LP album cues were used. They don't have that signal present, nor the 2005 DVD version of "Asteroid", which suggest that it sounds great because Murphy went for 24 track with that cue. It's safe to assume that they didn't used the 24 track tapes for all cues on this release, even though they were supposed to have all the material used for the 2LP album (therefore, this release). Makes me wonder who well they were preserved from 1997 on...

I tried, but no luck. However, looking at BMI a while ago, I found: Pete At The Refrigerator Explosion Of Pete's Plane Dorinda's Flying Entrance Dorinda Survives

The 300 MCU films 😱

The Shining. Oh my God.

I was trying to make a joke. Referring to Horton. Because it's about an elephant. Joke failed... Not sure what score you're referring to though.

I'm counting on a Shawshank letter-writing situation. Disney: Dear Mr. Stu, we appreciate your persistence and enclosed are free copies of the remastered original albums Disco Stu: Well from now on I'm gonna write two letters per week instead of one Disney: Dear Mr. Stu, in response to your repeated enquiries Disney has hired Mike Matessino to produce properly expanded albums of all 9 Williams Star Wars scores and each will include bonus discs for correctly remastered original albums and bonus tracks. We trust this will fill your needs. We now consider the matter closed. Please stop sending us letters.

Wow, the music in that clip sounded great!!

See this is what happens when you don't surround yourself with yes men (and women)!