Omen II

I met Howard Shore once, nice bloke. I spoke to him briefly about New Zealand. Happy Birthday, BTW.

Does your question refer to Earthquake or The Eiger Sanction, @crumbs? Almost all of the source music in The Eiger Sanction is by John Williams, the exception being a minute or so of Chopin's Nocturne in E flat major heard emanating from another apartment as Wormwood climbs the stairs prior to his killing right at the beginning of the film. Most of the other source music (totalling about 12 minutes) is heard at Ben Bowman's ranch in Arizona while Hemlock prepares for his assignment on the Eiger, although there are also a couple of quasi source music pieces as Hemlock and Jemima get it on after he picks her up during a plane flight. The source music is similar in style to much of the source music in Earthquake. I agree with others' comments that a presentation of the full score would be revelatory. Not only is the OST a complete rerecording (as was the case with Jaws, Earthquake, The Missouri Breaks, etc.) but much of the brilliant music for the climbing scenes in the last third of the film is not represented at all. Just one example is the music for the scene where the French climber Montaigne is mortally injured in a rockfall, a classic Williams action cue that can be counted among his best work of the 70s, in my opinion. Incidentally, most of the source music in Earthquake is by John Williams, although he cannot claim credit for the Hare Krishna chant! Candice Rialson plays an art student who tells Hemlock (Clint Eastwood) that she will do "anything" to get a better grade. He tells her to go home and "study her little ass off"!

I ordered it at precisely 17:25 on Tuesday 6th October, but I have no idea when it shipped. My Intrada online account still has my old email address, so if any order confirmation or tracking updates were sent out, I would not have received any of them. I realised this half way through ordering but because I was still at work at the time I couldn't be arsed to change it, settling with taking a photo of the order confirmation screen Bruce Marshall-stylee in case I needed the order number at a later date. Yours is probably delayed because the aliens delivering the packages are worried about contracting COVID-19 if they venture into the East Midlands. If the common cold can do for them, they really ought to be at home on Mars shielding.

"They're already here!" My 2-CD set of War of the Worlds, I mean. See what I did there? My CD set arrived today and was waiting for me when I got home from work, well packaged by Intrada in a little box with some of those polystyrene things that look like anaemic Wotsits. I will never forget the date when the OST CD arrived in the post - 7th July 2005. Thankfully the day the expanded set arrived has been much less eventful and stressful so far!

No. Everyone in the audience had to wear a face covering.

Last weekend I attended my first live music event for seven months, a concert of a cappella singing by the wonderful vocal group VOCES8. They sing everything from Elizabethan madrigals to modern choral works by Eriks Esenvalds, Eric Whitacre, Kate Rusby and others. It was so nice to be able to hear live music after such a long time. I highly recommend their recent double album After Silence. It includes this stunning performance of Bach's Cantata 150 with the Academy of Ancient Music, amongst many other treasures ancient and modern.

Director Harry Bromley-Davenport wrote the music to at least a couple of his films, most notably Xtro and Whispers of Fear.

John Addison's score for Swashbuckler is a good one. As well as the main theme here, there is a fine suite on a Chandos compilation of the composer's music which includes the love theme. Although Jock Addison had a very distinctive, slightly whimsical orchestral style, this score sounds quite Goldsmithian in places.

Norman Lebrecht is the only person ever to have crossed the treacherous land border between Australia and Hungary and lived to tell the tale.

Eric Whitacre's The Sacred Veil was released last week and most of the selections can be sampled on YouTube. See my post earlier in the thread for more details about the piece. This is the first of the twelve movements, entitled The Veil Opens. He also wrote a piece called Sing Gently for a virtual choir to sing during lockdown. More than 17,000 people from 129 different countries contributed and it's really quite moving.

A positive review from James Longstaffe at Presto Classical (the CD is their recording of the week): https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/articles/3432--recording-of-the-week-john-williams-conducts-the-vienna-philharmonic

Today marks the 75th anniversary of VJ Day. As well as John Williams' Hymn to the Fallen, another of the pieces performed at today's memorial service at the National Memorial Arboretum was Only In Sleep by the contemporary Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds. This performance by Rachel Ambrose Evans with the choir of Trinity College Cambridge is stunningly beautiful.

The chase music written by Billy Goldenberg for Busting is just great. I was lucky enough to see him play the piano at the Savoy Theatre in London a few years ago, accompanying Bea Arthur of Golden Girls fame; pretty random maybe, but a nice memory of a fine composer.

Witches!

This. These new fangled 'shaving mirrors' take up only a quarter of the space of those traditional 45s and 78s that form the bulk of all of our feem toon collections (along with cassettes, of course). Mark my words: they are here to stay.

I took advantage of a 25% off sale by Chandos of its film music titles (valid until the end of July) to buy three ?ç'D!"'s2 I had been meaning to get for a while. I am reasonably familiar with the music of Malcolm Arnold and William Alwyn, but know very little of Mischa Spoliansky. I love Chandos's film music series. There are some great discoveries in there from mostly (although by no means all) British composers and films from back in the day. http://www.chandos.net

To this day I still recreate this wonderful scene from Fiend Without a Face from time to time when I meet my brother. He always replies, "Gibbons!" instinctively.

It is very fitting that the clip was posted to Twitter by a Padre Ramirez. Tuco's brother, perhaps?

I was very saddened to hear of Ennio Morricone's passing this morning. He was truly one of the great composers of the last sixty years or so (and not just film composers) with a seemingly bottomless well of inspiration and genius from which to draw. I had the good fortune to see him conduct his music in concert six or seven times in London, including his first UK concert at the Barbican in 2001. I have particularly fond memories of his concert at the Hammersmith Apollo in 2006, as it was one that I took my Mum to see. She died on this day two years ago. Of all the wonderful pieces of music he wrote, the one that keeps going around my head today is the theme from La Ragion Pura - a typically gorgeous Morricone melody with ghostly trumpets (Morricone's instrument) interjecting in another key, as if commenting from another world. RIP Maestro. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family.

Dinosaurs!

Cheers Maurizio, that was a very interesting interview! I have been to a number of live to projection concerts conducted by Ben as well as several of those with the Orchestra of St. Paul's / Covent Garden Sinfonia and you can tell instantly that he has a real affinity with the music of John Williams and film music in general.

I am fairly certain that Summon the Heroes received its world premiere live performance at the LSO concert on 26th June 1996. I was at one of the concerts too so it was the first time I had seen John Williams in the flesh. In those pre-internet (for me) days I remember just going up to the Barbican and buying the tickets at the box office a few weeks beforehand when I read about the concerts in a magazine. As for the release date of the CD, the answer is in the programme if you still have it. There is a full page advert from Sony Classical stating that the CD would be released in the UK on 15th July that year but was available to buy at the Barbican in advance at the three concerts. I remember because that is when and where I bought my copy! You are probably not wrong as that is a fairly commonplace practice at such open-air events. The LSO mimed their performances at the London 2012 Olympics opening ceremony, for example; the string players were given cheap / fake instruments to use in case it rained.

E.T.2: It Lives Again went straight to video back in the day. In fairness, Williams’s score for the sequel was largely forgettable (the inspired scoring for the lengthy orgy sequence notwithstanding).

I picked up a copy of the free Metro newspaper on my way to work on Friday (not many others doing likewise - can't think why) and it looks like she is now angling for a 30 minute slot with old Johnny! Sixty Seconds with Edith Bowman

Just imagine it! The age of Henry Plantagenet! 😆