Tom Guernsey

Here are two photos I took at one of the Summer Music in City Churches concerts last year.  It is a wonderful venue in which to hear music - I am not surprised that Herrmann chose the church as the recording venue for some of his last few scores.
 

Richard Robbins is not very much talked about here. Why? Maybe most people haven't seen the exceptional films he has scored?
Anyway, I like this less than Maurice and The Remains of the day, but still a masterful score...

I know a guy with a TARDIS.  Anytime I ask him to take me somewhere, he says he would, but he just doesn't have the room.   

I would love to fly back to the first concert in Vienna in January 2020 when JW entered the stage...
 

Oops, yes, updated. Although I was going in my TARDIS so any date works for me.

Not a great deal to add to some excellent and detailed reasons as to why it's such a great, seminal score although a thought I've often had about Jaws' best score win. While I'm sure everyone knows it was JW's first Oscar for original score, it's astonishing to think that a film and score of that sort could win the award. I always feel a bit bad for Jerry Goldsmith as, in any other year, his score to The Wind and the Lion would surely have been a shoe-in to win. However, while I wouldn't say that Jerry didn't elevate TWATL with what is undoubtedly a superb score (one of his best), it doesn't make the film in the same way Jaws does. Jaws simply wouldn't be as good a film without its score. It is gratifying that Jerry won for The Omen the next year as he made the film the same way JW did for Jaws. Neither film would be nearly as thrilling without their respective scores.

More like four times as long as the suite, but the Nutcracker is a nice length - mine is the MTT recording with the San Fran Symphony, which I very much like and generally gets a listen at Christmas, at least! I have MTT with the LSO for Swan Lake and the Previn Sleeping Beauty, but at about 2 and a half hours each, I find myself flagging well before the end! Even Mahler doesn't go on that long...
 
I didn't know that about the highlights - I mean 20 minutes of a 2.5 hour score is never going to be truly representative but if I want a little bit of Tchaikovsky, it works for me! For some reason he's never been one of my favourite composers, even though I absolutely adore Russian composers, but guess I prefer the slightly more angular/rough sound of Prokofiev or Shostakovich than Tchaikovsky.
 
According to iTunes I listened to Sleeping Beauty last only a few months ago but will clearly have to give it another listen.
 
I would definitely recommend you trying the MTT Romeo & Juliet - to me it seems an ideal presentation of the music if you don't necessarily want the full thing. Maazel's full version is quite bracing - the Stealing the Enterprise fight segment (you all know what I mean!) really is played at full tilt. Might have to check out another version sometime to compare but have to admit that I don't listen to the full thing very often.
 
Despite having many, many Sibelius symphony cycles I don't have any by Maazel but sounds like I'll give it a miss! My favourites for Sibelius are probably Vladimir Ashkenazy and Osmo Vanska.
 
Interesting, but guess that makes sense. To be fair, so many ballets aren't performed as such these days and are just presented as concert music. I mean, when did anyone last see the Rite of Spring?!
 
Shame you didn't get to perform it in concert, that would have been great!
 
Another work to give another listen to! I have the Tintner cycle on Naxos as well as a few individual recordings. For the 6th the other version is Otto Klemperer, so should be pretty good!

Oops, yes, updated. Although I was going in my TARDIS so any date works for me.

I’m about to post knowing I won’t be able to put all the things I love about Jaws into words but here goes. 
 
I think I saw it for its first theatrical rerelease. I was probably 6 or 7 I guess. I remember I kept asking my mother “is this a true story?”  Yeah, it definitely was real to me. The thought of the shark being fake never ever crossed my mind.  These days, he’s a classic movie monster to me.  Real great whites aren’t as cool looking as Bruce.  
 
I also have fond memories of renting the Super8 ten minute reel from the public library and projecting that on a bedsheet in my room.  Make no mistake, even that little highlight reel would scare the shit out of me.  Although with that tech you could run it in reverse to watch Quint’s death backwards, quite amusing to a pre teen. 
 
The score… well obviously most joes can’t see the forest through the trees composed of two notes.   There is so much complexity and nuance to the complete score. Stuff you definitely don’t even pick up on the wonderful OST presentation. 
 
So many moments. 
 
Small motifs, like the serene “open ocean” motif that closes out the Preparing the Cage fugue on the OST makes two appearances in the score, when Brody looks through the estuary bridge to the open sea, and when Hooper and Brody are attempting to snag the two barrels.   That sustained note almost makes a sort of reprise of the final note in the End Titles as if to suggest the ocean is still and the water is calm once again. 
 
The sea shanties elevate this from terror, beyond adventure, to something impossibly joyous when it shouldn’t be.  And they’re not all “Spanish Ladies”.  There’s the main one based on the Orca theme, a secondary one that really brings the high adventure in Man Against Beast, and a third, which bears similarity to Spanish Ladies when it appears in One Barrel Chase.  But you need the full score to get the delightfully woeful actual singular quote of Spanish Ladies played by flutes against strained high strings suggesting hopelessness as Quint looks at the soaked life vests below deck. (“Quint Thinks it Over”) Absolutely brilliant. 
 
Can we talk about the shark theme?  Isn’t it more than a motif?  That slithering French horn that plays counterpoint to the ostinato is absolutely beautiful and fearsome. It opens up “The Pier Incident” in woodwinds to great effect.  The OST Main Title also has that wonderful series of triplets after the first crescendo of the motif.  You hear these triplets on harp along with the woodwinds playing the slithery counterpoint at the beginning of “The Empty Raft” (Kintner’s attack) and of course the harp triplets start off Chrissie’s Death in both recordings.  When the Shark Theme really crescendos on the OST Main Title, the triplets yield to that awesome motif suggesting the massive size of the shark, also heard in Man Against Beast (or Sea Attack Number One on the OST). This is not a two-note motif!  And yet, strip away the horn counterpoint or the harp triplets and you have “The Shark Approaches”, perhaps one of the most machine like, unstoppable, and yeah even scary statement of the theme in the whole score.  Those celli and double bass just chug that to pieces!
 
The End Titles start with the gentle four note bed with tolling bell. The perfect denouement to bring peace back to the audience.  One masterful allusion to that happens in the full score (“Tug on the Line”) which was dialed out in the film.  Maybe Spielberg felt Williams was telegraphing an eventual happy ending, but musically it’s a wonderful callback, or call forward in this case. 
 
@Belloshmentioned Blown to Bits, which features  the Cage Fugue played as an adrenaline surging shark hunter theme for when the men are getting serious about their work.   I love its appearance in Sea Attack Number One and of course Man Against Beast.   It allllmost is a prototype sound for the military theme from CE3K.   And the proper full treatment of the Fugue in Preparing the Cage … well, I don’t really have words. 
 
My god, how many themes are we up to now?
 
I haven’t even mentioned pieces like Night Search (which is like a mini movie in itself) and the Indianapolis Story.  Two notes!? “Jesus H Christ” as Quint would say. 
 
The writing for harp in Jaws deserves its own “Greatest Thing Ever” thread.  The aforementioned triplets, almost suggestive of rising bubbles before the leviathan breaches and hell breaks loose.  The frantic harp glisses in The Underwater Siege are astonishingly violent. And although JW isn’t the first to orchestrate underwater with harp, he’s the best. Those prickly plucks of confusion just before the shark pulls the estuary victim under his capsized boat make my neck hairs bristle.  
 
AND THEN you have “Father and Son”. Holy God, how can so much be conveyed with so little?  The delicate harp and piano, against the long sustained bass, acting as almost a foghorn of doom that still looms above Brody as he has a tender moment with his kid.  That this cue exists in this kind of film from that era is a miracle. 
 
From delicate to as violent as an orchestra can sound with “Quint Meets His End” (dialed out in the film, but used iirc in some TV Spots.  Jeepers that is orchestral thunder. And those shrieking piccolo stabs, coupled with the relentless two note brass hits, which recall similar brass for Man Against Beast where Quint waits until the last second to fire the harpoon.   Incidentally, I happen to personally enjoy Sea Attack Number One just a hair more than Man Against Beast, which gets a lot more attention (used in live performances to show the scene with and without music). 
 
It’s getting late and I gotta go to bed and I still haven’t even gotten to Out to Sea or The Promenade Montage!!!
 
I guess I’ll stop by saying Jaws never stops surprising me.  I know every note of many scores from his golden era, but Jaws is the one where I continue to find those little moments, that connective tissue that suggests that nobody in the crew took their job more seriously than Williams. 
 
Anyway, he delivered the bomb. 

Didn't want to post this on the JW concerts thread (lest anyone get to excited that he's finally rescheduled a London concert date) but Anne-Sophie Mutter is performing with the LPO on 13 January 2024, including the second violin concerto, plus selections from Tintin, Cinderella Liberty and Harry Potter, plus a suite from Superman and also Bernstein's On the Waterfront suite (which is terrific). Tickets not hideously priced (you don't need to be that close to the front at the Royal Festival Hall in my experience) and plenty of choice at the moment.
 
https://lpo.org.uk/event/mutter-plays-john-williams/

"Sci-Fi Symphonies: A Collection of Epic Scores for Futuristic Adventures"
Total Recall Demolition Man The Fifth Element The Matrix Minority Report War of the Worlds Inception Blade Runner 2049

At the risk of doing a Jay (sorry Jay ;-)...
 
 
 

I think I only have one recording of one of the suites because it was coupled with something else. Makes sense that they miss out the choral sections, although I'd think an orchestral only version of the full thing would make it a much more viable option as an actual ballet. For a regular concert, a chorus is probably easier to procure!
 
I enjoy the Tchaikovsky ballet suites although agree they miss out a lot of great stuff, but make a nice selection of highlights. In fairness, the Nutcracker isn't too long anyway. I need to give Sleeping Beauty (Tchaikovsky) and Cinderella (Prokofiev) another listen.
 
For Prokofiev's Romeo & Juliet, my go-to recording is with the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas which is almost 80 minutes of highlights and was, if memory serves, curated by MTT himself. It does much to remove some of the repetitious material and is an excellent summary of the full thing and a better summary than the three suites that Prokofiev himself selected - there's a recording on BIS which reorders the suites into chronological order but ends up missing out some interesting sections that MTT includes. For the full thing, my favourite recording is the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Lorin Maazel. I did have another recording of the full score which I didn't think was very good so don't have any more! Could probably do with another recording of the full ballet though.

I've taken the liberty of moving the ballet chat to the Classical Music Recommendations Thread... hope that's OK with everyone!
 

At the risk of doing a Jay (sorry Jay ;-)...
 
 
 

"Mission Theme", just now, on BBC Radio 2. I've no idea why it was on Radio 2, and I don't want to know.
The highest of the high forced to rub shoulders with the lowest of the low, squeezed in, between Harry Styles, and Ellie Goulding, on The Sara Cox Show.
Fuck's sake.
 
 
 
 

The (two) orchestral suites also dispense with the original ballet score’s choral element, which sucks. Obviously they were designed as easier-to-perform works for common concert performance (choirs are expensive for orchestras to add to performances!) but on album, there really is no reason to listen to the suites.
 
That said I’m also not a fan of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker suite, lol… it left off most of the ballet’s best music!! (And long as they are, I’ll also stick with my complete Sleeping Beauty and Romeo & Juliet, thankyouverymuch…)
 
Yavar

Hah, well yes, even with that caveat it does pretty great sound - classical music of the period got much better recording quality than most film music! Funnily enough, I was just about to update my post to note the BIS version which I don't have but as BIS is one of my favourite classical labels who rarely disappoint and whose albums feature some of the best engineering in the business. Looks like the Dutoit album is highly recommended too (his Planets is my go-to) out of far too many versions lol.
 
As a note, I would also dissuade anyone from bothering with the suites as the full thing is only 55 minutes or so and isn't repetitive in the way that some longer ballet scores are (i.e. those by Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev where the full thing can run to 2 hours and have quite a lot of repetition).

Ah cool, I might have to check it out. I also have the recording by the Boston Symphony under Charles Munch which is often regarded as a benchmark recording and, for a 1955 vintage, sounds excellent. However, think it might be a bit tricky to find these days.

My go-to recording is the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Pierre Boulez. The performance is terrific and Boulez always gets a lot of clarity, which is ideal in such a lustrously orchestrated score; the orchestration and orchestra itself makes sure that it still sounds gorgeous so you get the best of both worlds in terms of clarity and lustre. I also have the LSO conducted by Claudio Abbado which is very fine too.

I forgot there was one more little missing snippet of music!  About thirty seconds or so of rather static tense strings and woodwind interjections were cut from The Sentry Reel on the OST:

Not an unreasonable edit for an OST, sure, but I'd still say it'd be worthy of a "contains previously unreleased music" tag.
 
Here's how I handle it in my newest fanedit:
34;56 - The Sentry Reel.mp3
 
Also, while it's not "missing" music, I'd have to say one of the things I'd look forward to the most on a NIMH expansion is being able to hear Flying Dreams Lullaby completely discrete without the Cable music at the end:
 
To be able to bask in its cozy loveliness without then being forced to listen to this shady sneaking-around music in the same track that spoils the mood of the wonderful song you just heard.

I have to admit that I had a similar kind of realisation when I discovered just how much James Horner and (to a lesser extent) JW owed to the classical composers of the past. That first time you hear Schumann's 3rd Symphony (Willow) or Death and Transfiguration (Love Theme from Superman), for example and you realise that your favourite composers aren't perhaps as original as you hoped, but then you realise that it matters less that it's not 100% original and that what they did with the music they referenced is to turn it into something of their own (as I've commented a few times, James Horner pretty much always manages to sound like James Horner no matter how much he pilfered from the classics and other film composers). Same goes for Star Wars which, while referencing these various things to a greater or lesser extent, is still its own thing. There's nothing new under the sun.

My go-to recording is the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Pierre Boulez. The performance is terrific and Boulez always gets a lot of clarity, which is ideal in such a lustrously orchestrated score; the orchestration and orchestra itself makes sure that it still sounds gorgeous so you get the best of both worlds in terms of clarity and lustre. I also have the LSO conducted by Claudio Abbado which is very fine too.