Tom Guernsey

I feel I should have picked Jane Eyre or Dracula over The Cowboys, but the latter is just so much fun and memorable. But Jane Eyre is absolutely stunning, a shame there isn't more of it. Dracula I want to love and the recent re-release is great, although the sound still doesn't really do it justice despite best efforts.

I immediately jumped to Solo, although does that count as he wrote a specific theme for it? Of the Harry Potter sequels, the only one I think is really close to that level is Patrick Doyle's Goblet of Fire. I can't get into Jerry Fielding's Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (but then never got into Williams' original). Neither of the latter Jaws sequels excited me as much as I hoped, although for cheesy sequels, Superman VI: The Quest for Peace by Alexander Courage is pretty great, although again Williams wrote original material for that. I haven't heard any of the later Home Alone scores but I can't imagine they are a patch on the originals. Well that was startling inconclusive... and I'm also now wondering if I missed the angle of the original question.

Thanks for the explanation! I have the Bremner Magnificent Ambersons, but not the Citizen Kane album. I think the current ones I have are good enough, unless this is really worth picking up? I'll have to give the Magnificent Ambersons another listen though, I don't know that one at all (but feel I ought to).

They are indeed, lots of really great albums both classical and film music, especially their British film music releases. Sorry for the confusion with my British sense of humour...

I didn’t know there was one? The same guy who did the Magnificent Seven recording?

Yeah. Chandos’ infamy. Haha. Anyway thank you for posting what I could not and hopefully some good Herrmann will be had by all.

In my defence, I wasn’t sure I should post a link else I would have done but thanks for doing so. It really is a great album! The other tracks on this album are well worth having too. Shame he hasn’t done more Herrmann really.

I've started looking through release which include the original album to try and determine if there's any benefit in retaining the original album or if it's just a case of making a playlist with the expanded/complete score. Some helpfully tell you how to recreate the original album - case in point being First Knight, which is pretty simple aside from the fact that Jerry decided to rename several of the cues. Otherwise, aside from a couple of very minor edits, the cues are identical, so that's one to ditch (although I think First Knight pretty much works complete, it's such a great, fun score). On the other hand, The Wind and the Lion notes don't say whether the original album cues are the same as the expanded edition. Any ideas? Would be good to start a catalogue for those of us who care about such things (although I concede even by JWFan anal retentive standards, it's close to the most, erm, retentive...).

A definite shame re North by Northwest, for my money the best way to experience that score. Torn Curtain definitely suffers from the worst reverb of any Varese re-recording and the Bernstein version is preferable (if not complete), although also hard to obtain! Maybe Quartet will do another re-recording of it sometime. For Citizen Kane, I highly recommend the recording on Chandos conducted by Ramon Gamba which I think edges the McNeely version and I think is more or less complete (it's a couple of minutes shorter but I don't know if that's just tempo variation or missing music). If it's not easy to get on CD, it's available for lossless download.

Oh right. I have the Sony set so will have to check. I’m pretty sure I bought the Craft recordings separately but perhaps they were grouped differently on the Naxos release. I’ll have to dig out the box (packed away now it’s all ripped!). An absolute bargain though...

They may well have been originally, but whoever they were originally for, Naxos definitely rereleased a number of them.

Man I feel so lucky not to really have missed anything I hugely wanted. The things I did miss (such as the Poseidon Adventure or Patton, for example) got re-released eventually. There are some of the 60s JW scores on FSM that came out when I wasn't aware of that I missed, but fun though they are, aren't crucial purchases although I'd pick them up if they got re-released.

It might be a re-release. A number of Stravinsky albums with Robert Craft conducting the LSO have appeared on Naxos (well worth picking up, especially for the less well known works such as the Symphonies in C, in Three Movements and Psalms, all of which are absolutely superb).

Thanks @Disco Stu, I think I'll be checking out the Shor! Naxos posted about Howard Hanson earlier in the week for his birthday and realised that I only had a couple of recordings of his symphonies but Naxos had released recordings of all of them performed by the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz (originally on Delos I think) and discovered that Presto were selling the entire set of symphonies for download for less than a fiver (the same price as a single disc). Too good a bargain to miss so purchased there and there and been working through them, in amongst listening to some of the great scores from movies starring the late, great Sean Connery (man, he had a tremendous roster of composers behind him and some of Jerry Goldsmith's best scores to boot). Anyway, back to Hanson... I highly recommend anyone who likes their film music sweeping and romantic to check his stuff out, the Nordic (no 1) in particular. The second is probably the most infamous, featuring two significant film music connections. The first movement was, as most will know, used for the end credits of Alien. It works pretty well but obviously thematically and tonally disconnected from Goldsmith's classic score. Then there's the final movement which is uncannily similar to the bicycle chase from ET. The way Williams adds beats resulting in odd length bars (measures if you're American!) makes his, erm, interpretation(!?) rhythmically more interesting and propulsive. However, the Hanson is still worth checking out.

I have the same issue with Bavmorda's Spell Is Cast from Willow. It's a pretty even 50/50 split between not hugely exciting suspenseful noodling and the second half being a great action cue. I kinda hope that any expanded version does actually split them as the first half of that track is pretty hard work!

Did anyone ever put together one disc versions of the hobbit scores? I enjoy them but sometimes nice to have a highlights selection!

The first generation copy is always the best ;-)

Oh brilliant. Thank you very much indeed! Much appreciated.

I think that broadly matches my approach. Williams usually creates such good albums that it's great to have them as a separate entity to the full thing. Funnily enough, the main case where I don't have the original album arrangements are the original Star Wars scores as the first time I bought them was the Arista box set. Having seen how they were laid out originally, I can't imagine myself wanting to listen to those scores so out of order from the films, far too familiar with both the movies and the music. Plus the Star Wars scores are perhaps the epitome of scores that tell the story through music. Curious that the original Superman album presentation is broadly (entirely?) in film order when the Star Wars scores were not. On the point about not recovering costs, I have been quite lucky in being able to sell off original albums, sometimes at fairly decent money. I think someone bought the original Cowboys CD for £20, which pretty well covered the cost of the expansion. Similar for Dracula and a few others. Obviously things like Titanic and Robin Hood: POT aren't worth bothering to sell so they will probably go to the charity shop, but I've been surprised at how much people will pay for difficult to obtain/out of print original soundtrack albums. Having said that, nobody has yet purchased Earthquake after it was superseded by the Disaster set! However, it's worth having a look as some OSTs are worth trying to sell. I totally forgotten about the LOTR scores as examples where I absolutely elected to retain the original score albums as well as the expansions. Similar to Starship Troopers, I find the original albums make for a more concise (notwithstanding that they were fairly long!) presentation of the highlights of each score that still effectively tells the story in music but in a more abridged format. I bought both the original and slightly expanded Hobbit scores, but elected to retain both versions even though the differences are relatively slight between them. On that note, does anyone have or know where there's a breakdown of which tracks are the same and which are different between the releases? I have to admit that releasing them in two, very slightly different but (more or less?) complete versions struck me as quite odd. I've tried to whittle each of the three scores down to a single CD length album but no luck. Anyone tried?

I saw the HTTYD suite at the Concert for Care at the Royal Albert Hall organised by David Arnold years ago, and it sounded pretty amazing. But totally agreed, a Solo suite would sound great live.

Oh for sure, it was more the fact they had recorded something from the underscore than anything. Shame that performance wasn't recorded.

As ever, "video unavailable" but I think it was a CPPO recording... although not sure what album it was. Sadly JP is lacking a compilation album. I hope someone does one though (although better than the synth HTTYD album that Silva Screen put out, that was a crushing disappointment).

Good choice... any of those suggested make pretty good concert pieces, with not too much amendment. As I commented in respect of HTTYD, Powell is pretty great at writing self contained cues, which make musical, dramatic and narrative sense, and cues from Solo similarly lend themselves to concert arrangements that work well in isolation. I'm sure I saw a compilation already out there that had a track from Solo that was from Powell's score, although I can't for the life of me remember what the compilation was. Possibly a live concert recording, but was surprised (and kinda gratified) that it wasn't The Adventures of Han!

Agreed! I guess that's the crux of what I'm getting at... being able to do that and how close those approximations are of the OST. Sometimes it's tiny moments so you'd hardly notice, like Star Trek II, the only difference I'm aware of is that Battle in the Mutara Nebula hangs onto that long synth/high strings note about 40 seconds from the end longer than it originally did, but otherwise the tracks are (I think) identical. But then my "album" version includes a few of the expanded cues (such as Enterprise Attacks Reliant and the fun Kirk in Shuttle Cue) but I don't miss some of the more suspenseful tracks from earlier on. I've started a playlist for Star Trek V too as a couple of the action cues were edited for the original album to take out some repeated bars and a couple of pauses which, musically, are more enjoyable in their album incarnation.

I think you're right. James Horner seems the easiest to do it for on the whole, guess he never really was much into micro-editing or combining cues. I saw your comment regarding An American Tail, I did a playlist version that omitted the songs. They are fun, but kinda twee and somewhat undercut the tone of the score (which is fairly subtle but quite serious much of the time) so it's nice to be able to skip them once in a while.