Popular Post QuartalHarmony 543 Posted December 20, 2022 Popular Post Share Posted December 20, 2022 My (slightly early) Christmas present is a subscription to Gramophone, which enables me to search through back issues all the way back to 1923. After a little searching, I found this in the March 1978 edition. According to the Bank of England's inflation calculator, £5.50 in 1978 is the equivalent of about £27.50 today - ironically, more or less what the specialist labels are charging for a decent expansion today! A year later, Superman got damned with faint praise, but in April 1983 they saw fit to give Williams a bit more credit: ET (Williams). Film soundtrack recording [sic] After Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it would have been easy for John Williams to repeat himself in ET and settle for musical clichés, all too redolent of composers in a hurry to meet the deadline set by their producers. So it says much for his collaboration with Steven Spielberg that each of his scores has been carefully thought through , and that on this occasion he has capped all his previous work with a consistently magical series of compositions culminating in no mere hollow apotheosis, but a genuinely triumphant conclusion where the fanfares joyfully celebrate ET's departure for home to the image of a cascading rainbow. Another aspect of these selections I rejoiced in was the absence of all recent trends in 'pop' scoring; the track "ET and me" is a glistening composition for harp and strings, while in "ET phone home" the composer's use of a celesta to pinpoint the child /alien relationship, conjures up a happy comparison with Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker. Elsewhere one recognizes other now familiar touches from Williams such as the rushing scales on high winds and the ostinato figures that propel his sketches along. The recording has been made at a somewhat lower level than usual, though nothing a notch or two on your amplifier won't rectify; as far as the musical quality of this score is concerned I need only reiterate that no purely instrumental soundtrack has given me as much delight to review as this one. ADRIAN EDWARDS Back to March 1976 for this one (again, for comparison, £2.90 equates to about £18 in today's money): JAWS (John T. Williams). Music from the film soundtrack conducted by the composer. MCA MCF2716 (£2.90). Ever since his lively and inventive score for The Reivers I have considered the American John Williams one of the best of today's film composers, and this is one of his finest works to date. Writing on the sleeve, director Stephen Spielberg compares him to Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and listening to the twelve short tone poems recorded here one sees exactly what he means. I don't think I have heard the ocean conveyed so successfully in music since Korngold's score for the Errol Flynn sea adventures, and in many ways this surpasses them. Although he has composed a striking main theme Williams has eschewed the lazy way of Hollywood composers nowadays, whereby every track is a variation on it. Instead he has written an original piece of music for each occasion and incident in the picture and the results are both graphic and exciting. One can imagine each scene even without seeing the picture, so vividly pictorial is his writing. For once this is a record to play again and again. Incidentally it is technically magnificent as well, a recording of the highest possible quality. Recommended not only to those who want a film souvenir, but to anybody who enjoys truly exciting music. P .M . BB-8, Matt S., Score and 4 others 5 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
enderdrag64 624 Posted December 20, 2022 Share Posted December 20, 2022 "two versions under review": were they given access to the sessions/film stems for review purposes? Or was there some kind of FYC album in the 70s that I don't know about Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jay 37,372 Posted December 21, 2022 Share Posted December 21, 2022 What? He's reviewing the OST 2xLP and the Zubin Mehta re-recording at the same time. QuartalHarmony and BB-8 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post TownerFan 4,983 Posted December 21, 2022 Popular Post Share Posted December 21, 2022 Should also be noted that the reviewer is the esteemed Christopher Palmer, i.e. a distinguished film music historian and also a fabulous composer, arranger and orchestrator--he collaborated with Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein among others. His book The Composer in Hollywood is an essential reading for any true film music aficionado. I also love the notes he wrote for the TESB re-recording by Charles Gerhardt as printed on the Varèse Sarabande release, it's a sort of mini-essay on JW: Quote John Williams and His Music John Williams, born in New York in 1932, seemed destined at first to be a pianist rather than a composer. He studied at Juilliard under Rosina Lhevinne, and his early years in Hollywood were spent playing piano in studio orchestras. At this time – the mid-1950s – Hollywood was still in its heyday, and Williams found himself working for composers of the caliber of Alfred Newman, Franz Waxman and Dimitri Tiomkin – the best possible practical experience for one destined later to step into their shoes. At UCLA Williams studied composition with Mario Caslelnuovo-Tedesco, and his latent ability as writer was soon recognized in the studios. At first he wrote only orchestrations (Adolph Deutsch's The Apartment and Tiomkin’s Guns of Navarone were among the films he worked on in this capacity) and he acknowledges a great debt in this regard to the late Conrad Salinger, then the man responsible more than anyone else for the unique sound of the MGM musicals. Something of Salinger’s influence perhaps survives, specifically in the extraordinarily beautiful end-title orchestral setting of the Superman love-theme and. in more general terms. in Williams' work as arranger/musical supervisor on such musicals as Goodbye Mr. Chips, Fiddler on the Roof and Tom Sawyer. To these productions he brought style and fine finish in a manner redolent of the good old MGM days at their best. By the early 1960s Williams was composing music for feature films and TV, producing between 15 and 30 minutes of music per week, often for months at a stretch. for the Kraft Theatre series. He also worked for Columbia Records' as pianist, arranger and conductor, and made a number of albums with Andre Previn, who was under contract at the same time. Films tended to be glossy comedies like John Goldfarb Please Come Home and How To Steal A Million, but took a more serious turn in the early 19705. Major directors began to look in his direction, chief among them Hitchcock (Family Plot) and he almost became typecast as a disaster-movie specialist (Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno). Other important scores of the early to mid-1970s include The Reivers, Images, The Cowboys and The Missouri Breaks. His association with Steven Spielberg began with Jaws in 1976 and has so far encompassed also the masterly Close Encounters of the Third Kind and 1941. Star Wars was a milestone not only as far as Williams' career in itself was concerned but also because it marked the re-emergence into the limelight and critical approbation of the symphonic film-score, dormant for nearly a decade. The Fury, Superman and Dracula followed in quick succession, to the more current Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Return of the Jedi, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Williams has never cared to become stigmatized as a composer exclusively for movies: therefore. he has maintained also a steady flow of concert works written for the most part in an advanced but still basically tonal and expressive idiom. His Essay for Strings has been widely played in the USA, his Sinfonietta for wind ensemble was recorded by DGG, and his Symphony No.1 received an important London performance under André Previn. A recording of the Williams Violin and Flute Concertos (Varese Sarabande Digital 704.1201) was released in 1983. In 1980 he succeeded the late Arthur Fiedler as conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. John WiIliams is a complete professional in respect to every facet of his art. He is not a man to indulge in egomaniacal braggadocio or publicity-seeking gimmickry: rather he is a private person, quiet reserved (though never aloof), soft-spoken (though very articulate in the matter of expounding his technique and thought-processes), and an oasis of cool, commanding competence in a business constantly and frenetically riven by practical pressures and clashes of artistic temperament. His approach is a no-nonsense, down-Io-business one with respect not only to the writing of his music but to its performance and recording: one can well imagine him earning the esteem of the late Benjamin Britten whose work and life-style similarly bore all the marks of a supreme and well-ordered professionalism. In fact Williams perpetuates the tradition of Hollywood studio craftsmen in whose midst he grew up, men who gave no thought to the wearing of posterity as an armband but who were concerned merely with doing there job to the best of their ability and with a minimum of fuss and bother. When as in Williams' case, this deceptive ease in the negotiating of intimidating: technicalities and practicalities of filmscoring is combined with what may appropriately be described as 'star quality' in a composer, the resulting draught has to be a heady one. Williams produces his music as required and on time and in vast quantities. His composing method is identical with Prokofiev’s inasmuch as the music is first laid out In the form of very detailed sketch or compressed score: this is then turned over to a skilled and long trusted colleague for the preparing of a full orchestral score. In this way the composer is spared a deal of time and physical energy which he can then focus far more profitably on the actual substance, the musical quality, of what he is composing. And the consistent quality of Williams' music in the light of his high productivity rate compels admiration. This has become the more noticeable over the last few years inasmuch with the advent of Star Wars his musical personality seemed to take on a sudden and vivid new dimension. His instrumental expertise had never been in question, but Star Wars revealed a new access of technical power, an enhanced splendour and luxuriance of orchestral imagination. The same film brought evidence of a new strength and distinction of melodic invention, an impression consolidated by the finale of Close Encounters, Superman and The Empire Strikes Back. The latter yielded a fine crop of tunes: the romantic theme for Han Solo and the Princess is shot through with a quality of intergalactic remoteness which finds a perfect foil in the warm expressiveness of Yoda’s Theme, first cousin to the Superman love-theme (surely Williams' loveliest Iyrical inspiration to date). But the piece de resistance of the score is the Imperial March, tart, rhythmic and aggressive: a fine contrast to The Throne Room in Star Wars which was another Imperial March but of the Elgarian, pomp-and-circumstantial order. Williams, in fact, almost alone among the new generation of film composers, has developed a sense of the epic: he can write in the grand manner, paint with broad strokes on a wide canvas. and do it with conviction. He has acknowledged his need to adopt musical styles in order to supply the needs of films widely divergent in character. He has also stated his belief that making the sound of today’s films relevant to the films themselves involves borrowing elememts, without prejudice. from whatever musical disciplines and traditions suit the purpose. He likes the idea of the blending and coalescing of traditional notions of musical syntax and expression with avant-garde techniques and pop, but is not interested in machine-made music: in the case of Robert Altman's Images all the human or subhuman effects were produced by live performers. At heart, Williams is a romantic traditionalist; the score of Close Encounters progresses with irrefutable dramatic, emotional and musical logic from a black chaos of atonality to a pure transfigured E-major diatony at the climax and consummation, and asserts the relevance of tradition to the world of today and tomorrow. One is reminded of the late Bernard Herrmann’s prophecy that the music of the future would move toward a new clarity and simplicity. In an age when many contemporary ‘concert’ composers have completely lost touch with their public, no one should underestimate the power of the cinema as a world-wide transmitting network: it cultivates musical awareness and determines mass-audience taste to a much greater extent than is commonly realized. Williams and his colleagues active in films – Miklos Rózsa, Jerry Goldsmith, Elmer Bernstein and Leonard Rosenman among them – are obliged to maintain civilized contact with their listeners, otherwise the effect of their work would be negated. But in maintaining this contact they are continually finding new. vital and exciting things to say – things people want to hear within the confines of an idiom which in theory has been obsolete for decades. In practice it has never been more alive. The Empire Strikes Back and other scores of its genre bear triumphant testimony to that. Christopher Palmer London, England BB-8, Martinland and BrotherSound 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post BB-8 3,482 Posted December 21, 2022 Popular Post Share Posted December 21, 2022 I just love the work Christopher Palmer did for Prokofiev! And what came out on record! TownerFan, Score, Jurassic Shark and 1 other 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Score 770 Posted December 21, 2022 Share Posted December 21, 2022 26 minutes ago, TownerFan said: Should also be noted that the reviewer is the esteemed Christopher Palmer, i.e. a distinguished film music historian and also a fabulous composer, arranger and orchestrator--he collaborated with Miklos Rozsa, Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein among others. His book The Composer in Hollywood is an essential reading for any true film music aficionado. I also love the notes he wrote for the TESB re-recording by Charles Gerhardt as printed on the Varèse Sarabande release, it's a sort of mini-essay on JW: Notably, Christopher Palmer composed the memorable saxophone main theme for Taxi Driver ("So Close To Me Blues"), based on a theme by Herrmann. It's probably the most famous cue in that score. Fabulin and TownerFan 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BB-8 3,482 Posted December 21, 2022 Share Posted December 21, 2022 I didn't know that "Badedas" was a term in the English language, until now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rough cut 1,714 Posted December 21, 2022 Share Posted December 21, 2022 Good to know that, even back in 1978, soundtrack nerds obsessed over mistakes in the liner notes. Jay and BB-8 1 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeinAR 1,949 Posted December 21, 2022 Share Posted December 21, 2022 Remember these are no more valid than our own opinions. Time has the best opinion as all these score stand tall if not taller than they did back in the Day. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
QuartalHarmony 543 Posted December 21, 2022 Author Share Posted December 21, 2022 I still can’t quite believe that the prices of both Jaws and SW are, in real terms, exactly the same as today’s specialist label prices! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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