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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Watch Out. This Music Will Raise Your Cholesterol!, 22 Mar 2005
These performances appeared in 1995 on Naxos's full-price sister label, Marco Polo, and are among a spate of movie music scores making their appearances now at budget price. Some are wonderful - like Honegger's score for 'Les Misérables,' Georges Auric's 'Beauty and the Beast,' and Wojciech Kilar's 'Dracula.' Some don't stand up too well on their own, like Steiner's 'King Kong' or Waxman's 'Objective: Burma!'. But this one definitely has the best of the best, all in that late-romantic, richly scored music we associate with the genre. The producers have put together some of the best cues from four swashbucklers and from beginning to end this is music to enjoy, with no dead wood anywhere along the way.The Main Title of Miklós Rosza's 'The King's Thief' is a heckuva lot better than the 1955 Edmund Purdom movie for which it was written. Victor Young's 'Scaramouche' is represented by nine cues, among them the delightful 'Main Title' and the faux-baroque 'Pavane.' The inventor of this sort of movie music, Erich Maria Korngold, is here represented by six cues from the 1935 Errol Flynn blockbuster, 'Captain Blood.' All five cues are terrific and sweep you along, but I particularly like 'Slaves--Arabella and Blood,' a seven-minute tone poem of great beauty and ingenuity. Max Steiner, a transplanted Viennese like Korngold, contributes six cues from 'The Three Musketeers,' also from 1935. The love theme is really gorgeous. These scores were reconstructed by the late Christopher Palmer ('The King's Thief'), William Stromberg ('Scaramouche') and John Morgan ('Captain Blood' and 'The Three Musketeers') from conductor's piano scores; the full scores, like many of their era, were lost. In one case the score had only a violin line. The three arrangers attempted, then, to reproduce the orchestrations from the movie sound track itself, a difficult task at best, but it sounds to me like they did a marvelous job collectively. These orchestrations have the sweep and grandeur of the originals. The Brandenburg Philharmonic Orchestra (Potsdam, Germany) is conducted by Richard Kaufman. They are beautifully played and recorded. This one is worth having if you love the flamboyant style favored in adventure films; this is the crème de la crème. Scott Morrison
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~ Alexander Zagorinsky
~ Dimitri Tiomkin
~ London Symphony Orchestra
~ Alfred Newman
~ Max Steiner
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