Fabulin

QUARTET RECORDS Announces

HOLST: THE PLANETS
Conducted by Bernard Herrmann
Music Performed by London Philharmonic Orchestra
 
First-ever solo CD edition of the unique, fascinating and controversial Bernard Herrmann recording of Gustav Holst’s THE PLANETS!

Quartet Records, in collaboration with Decca Classics and Universal Music Enterprises, presents a remastered CD edition of the unique, fascinating and controversial Bernard Herrmann recording of Gustav Holst’s THE PLANETS.

Recorded during his post-Hollywood period when he was based in London, it was one of several albums he conducted for Decca Records’ Phase Four series, featuring both his own music and that of other composers. THE PLANETS has always been considered something of a cursed album, yet it is loved by his fans for an interpretation that is more Herrmann than Holst.

The recording was not universally acclaimed when it was released. This was in part because several recordings of the work already on the market were considered classics, thus setting a very high bar for new entries. Some listeners, however, found the heavy tread of Herrmann’s “Mars” an actual plus, its mechanistic bombast far more threatening and imposing than the composer’s own recorded performance. Herrmann’s slow trek through the “big tune” in “Jupiter” was more widely criticized, but Herrmann was far from the only conductor who favored slower tempi in the later stages of their career—including in some of the Phase Four recordings of his own music. Nevertheless, Herrmann’s THE PLANETS sold well.

Although reissued several times on LP in the 1970s, Herrmann’s recording of THE PLANETS was only released on CD in Australia in 2011 as part of a Holst compilation on Decca Eloquence.

This new, first-ever solo CD edition has been restored and mastered by Chris Malone from the original master tapes transferred by UME in the UK, and features brilliant, extensive liner notes by classical and film music writer Frank K. DeWald alongside the original LP liner notes by renowned musicologist Harry Halbreich.


Tracklist:

1. Mars, The Bringer of War (8:43)
2.Venus, The Bringer of Peace (10:04)
3. Mercury, The Winged Messenger (4:34)
4. Jupiter, The Bringer of Jollity (9:06)
5.Saturn, The Bringer of Old Age (9:31)
6. Uranus, The Magician (6:54)
7. Neptune, The Mystic (8:11)

Total Disc Time: 57:06

https://quartetrecords.com/product/the-planets/

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind

No, that would be Close Encounters of the Tired Kind

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind

Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind

The design is beautiful

The author is here!
 
@JCManuceau

Williams has written themes for better fan clubs than ours here. But they're all dead.

I think you copied Falstaft's Facebook post and then copied the title to the thread title. Facebook, Twitter & Co don't do italics, but there are websites that fake them by replacing latin characters with fancy unicode characters that look (more or less) like their italic equivalents. I bet if you run the thread title to a unicode code point extractor, you'll get all kinds of fancy characters.

The happy news I cryptically alluded to last week is now something I can make official: I just signed a book contract with OUP for 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘬𝘺𝘸𝘢𝘭𝘬𝘦𝘳 𝘚𝘺𝘮𝘱𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘦𝘴: 𝘔𝘶𝘴𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘚𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘺𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯 𝘚𝘵𝘢𝘳 𝘞𝘢𝘳𝘴!   It's a book it feels like I've been writing in my head for a long, long time -- since middle school, kinda? And unless Williams somehow returns to write another entry in the series, I'm treating it a chance to provide a properly 𝘴𝘺𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘤 investigation into these scores, all nine of them.   Even Rise of Skywalker?? 𝘌𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 Rise of Skywalker!   My hope is this book does some justice to the complexity, challenge, and sheer magic of this music.   Now, back to the grindstone!   https://www.facebook.com/Falstaft/posts/pfbid0L6wUjeDDxj6AmhwHh1f9obrVMJfYbPx4GJM8YaEWiZtqxwp37A88monPFVDxBQ26l  
Congratulations, @Falstaft!

What a farce. Disney has gone so acquisition-mad under Iger that they’re now sending Bishop from X-Men (company employee!) decades into the past to inform various titans of pop culture that they’re actually working for Disney, who will own them forty years hence. 
 
I can’t quite articulate why this feels so icky to me, but it’s the same feeling I got when The Sound of Music and Miracle on 34th Street showed up in their respective decades on the Disney100 section of Disney+ last year. They were not affiliated with you! They were, in fact, directly competing with you!
 
Disney is basically Mother Gothel now.  

Hey all. I uploaded a newer piece on youtube and was hoping if you guys listened to it and liked it that you would help me out with thumbs up for algorithm purposes. The piece was called Baba Yaga when we recorded it in 2019 but it's officially called Death of Koschei the Deathless now. I wasn't allowed to share it all until it had a world premiere and that happened 18th of Feb.
 
Much Love and Thanks!
 
 

Today I clicked on the video of Spacex's Starship making a re-entry into the atmosphere:
 
 
And just the title and thumbnail were enough for me to instinctively play a loop of:
 
 
to accompany it.
 
Does your brain also have an urge to hear fitting Williams pieces to scenes happening in your life (or in the news, or wherever)?
 
 

Late to the party, but thought I would add that there seems to be a connection between Williams' use of fugues in film and that of William Walton. The 1942 film, The First of the Few, is about the conception and construction of Britain's Spitfire fighter plane for World War II. In the scene where the Spitfire is finally being assembled, Walton writes a fugue. Now as @Falstaft rightly pointed out, a fugue is basically a texture that is built up one voice (melody line) at a time. The first voice announces the line that is the whole basis of the fugue, and is always called the "subject". Then another line enters with the same melody, as a rule transposed (usually up) by 5th to become the "answer", while the first voice continues with other material. Then another voice enters with the same melody, and so on...
 
Anyway, I lay this out again because I think this idea of gradually building up a texture from a single line nicely captures something in the process of making preparations. Things start off simply but become increasingly complex, and all the "moving parts", so to speak, need to work together for the plans to come off properly.
 
So take a look below at the way Walton does it in The First of the Few (should start at 7:51 for you). I think this is essentially how Williams uses his film fugues as well - Jaws, Black Sunday, and Home Alone. So it seems that he picked up this kind of association from Walton and really ran with it, giving it new life in key scenes from these films.
 
 
 

On episode 63 of The Best Song Podcast, I discuss the stories behind the creation of the five songs nominated for the 1995 Original Song Oscar. That includes "Moonlight" from the remake of Sabrina, a song written by John Williams and Alan & Marilyn Bergman. For all three of them, this would be their final Oscar nominations in the original song category. I covered this film in episode 77 of The Baton, but it would be great for you to hear the song stacked up with its Oscar competition, and celebrate John Williams' final original song nomination.
 
Competition was tough for this Oscar, though Disney went all-in for Alan Menken's chance to win a fourth Oscar for original song with "Colors of the Wind," and Bryan Adams had a #1 hit song with "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman." While the five nominees are great, you'll hear some songs that failed to get nominated, including a very popular song by Whitney Houston.

 

To be fair, even Raiders (film and score) would have lost again, were it the contender.

What a farce. Göransson a 2-time Academy Award winner.
While…
Alan Silvestri: 0
Danny Elfman: 0
James Newton Howard: 0
Thomas Newman: 0
John Powell: 0

As predicted: synth clutter is today's mainstream and wins the mainstream prize.
 
One reason more to love John Williams.

To be fair, even Raiders (film and score) would have lost again, were it the contender.

To be fair, even Raiders (film and score) would have lost again, were it the contender.

To be fair, even Raiders (film and score) would have lost again, were it the contender.

To be fair, even Raiders (film and score) would have lost again, were it the contender.

I really don't think the fact that it was orchestral and traditional was what people found meh about DoD.