DRG re-issued 2 killer scores, Jarre's A Passage to India and The North-Steiner 50s Capitol disc of A Streetcar Named Desire and 3 Steiner suites. This version of Streetcar is the best one out there. Goldsmith's later re-record has its moments but a quick comparison points out its faults. Steiner did a great job condensing & re-recording The Informer, Now Voyager, and Since You Went Away into short suites.

FSM keeps putting out gems. Force 10 From Navarone was short and sweet as was The Swimmer. I opened The Swimmer disc to see that now all too-familiar FBI anti-piracy shield printed right on the CD itself. What next, sirens & blue lights?

SAE listed a Jarre item, Notre Dame de Paris. Turns out this is a TDK DVD of a recent performance of a Roland Petit ballet based on Hugo that Jarre wrote the music for in the mid-60s. I'd never even heard mention of it!

A little research and I discovered that Petit and his wife had been involved in some films, doing ballet numbers for Hans Christian Andersen in 1952 and the 1956 version of Anything Goes before doing their own ballet film, Black Tights, directed by Terence Young and with original music by Marius Constant among others.

Petit is still alive and in the 90s he comissioned a ballet score from Gabriel Yared. A DVD of a performance of that ballet, Clavigo, is also available on TDK.

And both ballets are like 90 minutes of Jarre & Yared with only occasional footfalls to interrupt the scoring.

Moving from ballet to opera I found a DVD of a 2001 performance of Korngold's 1920 opera THE DEAD CITY/DIE TOTE STADT on Ebay. There is also a documentary about Korngold's life to be found from many sources on Ebay out there too but I haven't picked this up yet.

Percepto issued the score to Dinosaurus! by Ronald Stein. I've never seen the film (and stills from it make it look like it had less budget than my last kitchen remodeling) but the score has some great moments. What I have seen of course is Voyage to a Prehistoric Planet, the US re-working of Planeta Burg, that was tracked with a lot of Dinosaurus! cues. I always thought Voyage had an amazing Main Title cue and there it is in Dinosaurus! about :55 seconds into its Main Title, this wonderful barbaric theme in all its primitive glory. The theme shows up in a number of the other Dinosaurus! cues more towards the end of the score and I'm just so thankful to hear it unfettered after all this time.

I picked up the two latest MMM recordings. I'm very familiar with the This Island Earth score and the MMM release has been long-awaited. It comes close. It seriously disappointed me in a number of cues where things are a bit off but it comes close enough so that it should pass muster for most other people. The rest is a lot of B-movie music I'm unfamilar with. I love B-movie music nonetheless. It may not be A-movie music, but can still be wonderful. I can't compare a lot of the cues with their originals so the taste test came down to whether it worked as music to listen to on its own and it seems to. The one Paul Sawtell cue stands out as obviously Sawtell and an equally obviously good rendition. I didn't know what to make of Triffids. It doesn't sound like typical Goodwin to begin with. I'll just have to see if it grows on me.

Both Buysoundtrax and SAE have copies in of John Morris's The Scarlet Letter score that was issued by Super Tracks back in 1995. It's a short score but a solid one, very lush & moody. It should have opened up Morris's career to much wider acclaim & gotten him more serious projects just as The Elephant Man should have. It didn't but you can all hear why it should have if you pick up the disc.

Also--kudos to all concerned for Return to Peyton Place and House of Bamboo.

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Originally posted by Lou Goldberg:
Moving from ballet to opera I found a DVD of a 2001 performance of Korngold's 1920 opera THE DEAD CITY/DIE TOTE STADT on Ebay.

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Meanwhile, there have been a number of Scarlet Letters going back to the silent era. The one John Morris scored was for TV and a good version at that. The Demi Moore one that John Barry scored was a replacement score that as I recall was originally scored by Morricone.

Films1--You've gone further than I have in actually writing Silva on this. And of course you got the same screw-off reply as they give the public when they issue their actual product. Once a concern is corrupt, it's evil from the top right down to the stationery.

It would be nice if Silva saw the 2 errors of their ways: 1) bad renditions and 2) evil marketing. But I doubt it will happen. We completists will just have to go on buying whole albums of crap for one cue (of crap).

I neglected to mention a 3rd DRG release: Giant by Tiomkin. The OST doesn't really do justice to the film's score but it has the Main Theme, The Hunt, and two neat versions of the Jett Rink Theme which are all anyone needs to have to be happy.

I also wanted to say a little more about the MMM Mighty Joe Young disc. I generally like Roy Webb but with the exception of the chase & fire cues at the end of the score, this just isn't that great a score, regardless of how well it's rendered. 20 Million Years to Earth is a blend of original cues & library cues. It's a neat idea to record both to make up the suite. Three short original cues are ok: Emblem, Sicily, and Comet. The rest just go nowhere. The library cues are of better quality as per their pedegrees (Raksin, Amfitheatrof, Duning, etc.) but are still generic. And the Steiner cue doesn't sound any different from the rest. One library cue from the Mating of Millie by Werner Heymann is a very sweet cue of exceptional quality that stands out for being good and so different from the others.

I love the first 3 MMM discs. But after waiting so long for these MMM releases (they were recorded 7 years ago!) just to get these slightly-off quality discs, I have to hope that MMM can get back on track: find better scores to record, stick to playing & recording them well, and take less than a decade to get them out.

Lastly, I have to recommend Barry Gray's JOE 90 score to everyone. Most Gray scores are good and the Gerry Anderson stuff could be said to be just one big long epic score, but 2 of the lot stand high above the others, UFO and JOE 90. Joe's Main & End Title themes are just heaven.

J.