Marian Schedenig

And I think I prefer that merged version to having them separate on the MM release.

My thoughts exactly.

The 1998 Close Encounters release The Visitors/Bye/End Titles: The Special Edition (12:31)

While this is very cool news, I would be really, REALLY disappointed if we can't buy the eventual Williams SW expansions physically. Depending on the platforms it's sold on, you might not even be able to buy it more than once per platform! (At least not without creating multiple accounts)

And several Spielbergs:

In a book then?

I remember some "raw-sounding" stuff on the OST, but nothing as downright dirty and shaky as some of what I hear on the expansion. I've not listened to either of them often enough to make any definitive statement, but my impression was the the OST only used the best of the dirty bits.

Perhaps. But some of the big brass cues are really very hard to listen to, and that's putting it mildly. No, because my overall view remains the same as after the concerts. Of course, the recording makes the occasional mistakes more noticeable (and two or three painful), but those are gone in a moment and have no impact on the overall experience for me. And I have no interest in picking apart cues and playing bits and pieces over and over again, or sitting down and intimately comparing it to the rather lousy Dudamel album, just to come up with a somewhat objective review. I do however intend to post some of my views in the appropriate thread once I sit down and watch the whole thing again in full. But I've listened to most of it in shorter playlists often enough to know that it'll they'll mostly reflect my surprise and incomprehension of some (or many) of the harsher things that have been said about it.

Nor did he "read books", as per Tolkien's letters: "He is hasty, insensitive, and impertinent. […] It seems to me evident that he has skimmed through the L.R. at a great pace, and then constructed his s.l. from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original." Is any of that available anywhere? Tolkien's all too brief comments on them make me interested in what they looked like.

Now you're just mocking the reactions to your comments on Williams' Philharmoniker concerts.

I didn't know about that link between Alien and Tolkien. Which again reminds me that I never found out anything about the background of "Brandywine Productions", or how they came by that name? A couple of Tolkien's comments about the unproduced Ackerman project do seem somewhat picky (and a few show that, unless he changed his views, he wouldn't have been happy with some aspects of the PJ version - and I'm not talking about those parts that he would most definitely, and rightfully, have objected to). But most of the comments show that the proposed script (which I haven't read) must really have been quite horrible and absurd.

Well, they can't fix the performance… Anyway… 4 CDs… The previous release has 134 minutes. Add 20 to that and you're still under 2 x 80 minutes. I wonder how much else they can add to spread the non-album stuff to 3 discs. Or it's just a matter of some 2 minutes too many, or of a lengthy track that cannot be split, and it'll just be three 50 minute discs. The OST will be disc 4, obviously.

That would actually improve it quite a bit.

Ah!