CD Reviews 4/12/00
Edited by Jonathan Z. Kaplan
The Third Miracle ***1/2
Jan A.P. Kaczmarek
Milan 73138 35899-2
21 tracks - 50:06
After the unleashing of a plague of liturgical "end times"
religious horror pictures like Stigmata and End Of Days,
it was inevitable that a serious-minded filmmaker would get into the millennial
game. The result of this self-fulfilling prophecy is The Third Miracle,
which involves the investigation by a priest (Ed Harris) of a woman with
seeming supernatural powers. Depending on which reviews you read, this
was either one of the year's best films or a tiresome soaper, but composer
Jan A.P. Kaczmarek at least manages to rise above the clichés of
the genre with a thoughtful and often beautiful score.
The standard approach to this sort of material is to have a boy's choir
keen for 45 minutes in Latin over a shrieking, drum-laden club mix (as
in End Of Days). While Kaczmarek can't avoid the temptation to bring
that church choir effect into the mix, he uses it as a texture within an
otherwise nonliturgical style rather than having it as an end unto itself.
The score is enlivened by a minimalist sense of rhythmic development, sometimes
in the form of gently pulsing strings that recall the tuneful minimalism
of Michael Nyman. At other times, a world-music feel is created by marking
out beats with clapping hands. A zimbalon, recorders and the shrill sound
of something akin to a bagpipe add to the nonwestern feel in cues like
"Falcone" and the boy's choir is accompanied by a moody jazz
ensemble in "Domine Jesu" and "The Confession" (once
again bringing a fresh approach to an otherwise timeworn technique). There
are also lovely, brooding cues for a string ensemble emphasizing cello
solos by Marian Wasiolka, and haunting piano solos by Leszek Mozdzer. The
gloomy, rainy-day mood is rarely broken (although things do come to a head
in the final couple of cues with an added depth of lyricism and additional
orchestral forces). This is a good CD to play when you're sitting around
contemplating your mortality. --Jeff Bond
The Twilight Zone ****
Bernard Herrmann
Varese Sarabande 302 066 087 2
Disc One: 52 tracks - 63:15 Disc Two: 41 tracks - 43:15
If you didn't get enough Twilight Zone music out of Silva's 40th
Anniversary album there's still more classic Twilight Zone music
to be had in this long-awaited set of rerecordings done by Bernard Herrmann-specialist
Joel McNeely. The Varese set has two big advantages over the Silva release:
first of all, these are brand new recordings with superb sound quality--not
aging and muddy library cues rescued from somebody's vaults. Secondly,
the bulk of this Varese set's music has never been released before. This
collection focuses on Bernard Herrmann, with his less-familiar theme music
for the series and seven complete scores: the original pilot "Where
Is Everybody?," the nostalgic reverie "Walking Distance"
and the sci-fi tale of love with a robot ,"The Lonely" (all heard
on the Silva collection). But then there's the long-coveted music for classic
Herrmann-scored episodes like "Eye of the Beholder," "Little
Girl Lost," "Living Doll" and "Ninety Years Without
Slumbering."
The very idea that a composer as legendary and uncompromising as Bernard
Herrmann would work in the TV medium at first seems outrageous, but Herrmann
began his career in radio and he adapted quite well to the television medium,
particularly in its stark, early black-and-white days. He wrote an inexorable,
slowly undulating title theme for The Twilight Zone that was the
flip side of Marius Constant's familiar ostinato-driven, agitated signal
music. Herrmann's "Where Is Everybody?" is as diabolical as any
of his film work, while "Walking Distance" plumbed the depths
of the composer's rich vein of sentimentality (an emotion he always appeared
to bury beneath a veneer of hostility). "The Lonely" emphasizes
the isolation of its two characters (trapped on an asteroid) with glistening
textures from harp, glockenspiel and vibraphone. "Eye of the Beholder"
is melancholy and sympathetic until its final, ironic revelation ("Hysteria")
brings a moment of uncompromising Herrmann horror.
Disc two opens with Herrmann's unused alternate Twilight Zone
title music, which is very much in character with his theme music to the
science fiction film The Day The Earth Stood Still. "Little
Girl Lost" is a highlight of the album, with a spectacularly eerie
score. The episode involves a young girl who disappears into the fourth
dimension, and her family's ensuing attempts to locate her--it's a clear
inspiration for Poltergeist, right down to the camera angles. Herrmann
produced morose, eerily tuning strings and melancholy treatments of the
parents' concern over their child. "Look For Her" features the
same foreboding kind of low harp progression that marked Herrmann's striking
Beneath The Twelve Mile Reef , but the highlight of this score is
the dazzling "Fourth Dimension" cue, which moves from harp glissandi
to a set of spine-tingling ostinati for flute and piccolo that will set
your hair on edge. I can't think of more perfect music to accompany the
exploration of an alien dimension. In "Living Doll," a diabolically
churning bassoon characterizes the vocalized death threats of a talking
doll, while "Ninety Years Without Slumbering" appropriately bases
its score on the children's tune "My Grandfather's Clock" for
this tale of an old man's paranoid belief that his heart will stop the
moment an ancient clock in his house stops ticking.
I'm normally not a fan of rerecordings--and the weak spots of this ambitious
album are the three previously-available scores, which can be easily compared
to the originals for differences in timing and intonation. But the close
miking and small ensembles used by The Twilight Zone are well-reproduced
here. Herrmann's psychotically focused repetition will likely be maddening
to the casual listener (nobody could get more use out of two notes), but
this is exactly what made his music perfect for Rod Serling's creepy anthology
series: it was the music of madness and alienation, ingeniously disorientating
and disturbing. --Jeff Bond
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