Film Score Friday 2/18/00
by Lukas Kendall
Composer Doug Cuomo and his band of top Latin and jazz musicians are
performing selections from their music for HBO's Sex and the City next
Wednesday, 2/23, at Birdland, 315 W. 44th St in New York City. Tickets
are $20, call Birdland at 212-581-3080. Good stuff.
The Society of Composers and Lyricists and UCLA are presenting their
second annual SCL/UCLA fundraising dinner and concert on March 8, 2000
at the University's Faculty Center. It's expensive, because it's for charity:
$100 -- but, a good cause. Call the SCL at 323-281-2812, ext. 3. This year's
program includes music by John Barry, Leonard Bernstein, John Cacavas,
Bill Conti, Aaron Copeland, Jerry Goldsmith, Jerry Grant, Marc Shaiman,
John Williams and others.
It looks like upcoming Decca release of the original soundtrack to Jaws
(John Williams) will NOT be a combination of the re-recording (already
on CD) and OST, but solely the OST -- 50-60 minutes. It's due in July.
Superman
Speaking of long awaited John Williams restorations, the following is
representative of the euphoria which has greeted Rhino's 2CD set of the
OST of Superman:
From: "knightbg" <knightbg@mindless.com>, Brian Gruber
I just got my new superman score in the cdplayer. all i can say
is wow. congratulations are in order for all involved, especially mr. matessino
whose liner notes are, as always, the best. In fact, I would say they're
the best thing about any of the scores he has helped to put out. In-depth
enough for the diehard fans, but at the same time explanatory enough for
the musical layman. it was in fact his fabulous liner notes for starwars:se
that got me really interested in film scores to start with. also, the package
and presentation are great (the kind that makes me positively ashamed to
put the discs in my cd-album). wow.
Oscar Crankiness
This happens every year, so here we go again! See Wednesday's
column for list year's music nominees:
From: "tnealbrown" <tnealbrown@email.msn.com>
Why wasn't The Phantom Menace (John Williams), The Mummy (Jerry
Goldsmith), The Thirteenth Warrior (Goldsmith again!!!), Anna and the King
(George Fenton), or Sleepy Hollow (Danny Elfman) not nominated for best
score? Why wasn't Toy Story 2 (Randy Newman), or The Sixth Sense (James
Newton-Howard) not nominated??? These scores that I have just mentioned
have all been ripped off for this year! Let's face it--this year is not
that good with music. All I have to say is THE ACADEMY (especially this
year!!!) IS VERRRRY STUPID!
From: Blcinnamon@aol.com
So glad to see Goldsmith shorted of the nominations this year, that
way we don't have to pretend that they might actually consider giving him
a trophy!
That's one way of looking at it...
From: MHazotte@aol.com
once again, oscar nominations for best score are not very exciting.
We can note the absence of Chris Young "The Hurricane", Danny
Elfman "Sleepy Hollow" , James Newton Howards' "Snow Falling
On Cedars", Elliot Goldenthal's "Titus" or Jerry Goldsmith's
"The 13th Warrior"...
I also find scandalous the decision to cancel nominations for best
score for a comedy or a musical (Tarzan, Being John Malkovich, Iron Giant
among many others don't earn nominations because of that). It's sad, but
we are used to that. I also don't understand why Jim Carrey, Milos Forman,
Tim Burton, David Lynch, Norman Jewison or the team of The talented Mr.Ripley
(except Gabriel Yared) and Any Given Sunday are not nominated. They all
deserve awards. The problem this year is that there were too many great
movies, so it's impossible to award all of them. The academy had to make
choices but I don't think that these are the rights choices...
But being french, I'm glad to see Est-Ouest nominated for best foreign
film, also I'm practically sure that Almodovar's superb All About My Mother
will win. It doesn't matter because the Regis Wargnier film earned 8 nominations
to the french Cesars and among them, one is for best score, composed by
Patrick Doyle! I hope he will win!
Well, too late on that one already... hey everybody, send YOUR thoughts!
Also from Wednesday's Column...
A response to a point raised in Cary Wong's picks
of 1999 on Wednesday:
From: mleneker@webtv.net (mark leneker)
For Cary Wong:
Elliot Goldenthal spoke recently here in NYC. He talked about Titus
and said it was completely temped with previous work he had done--which
made Titus such a challenge: he had to top himself. This explains its lack
of "subtlety". The Time to Kill track was kept because it did
the job to begin with. Elliott said he would NEVER want to work that way
again. I can't say I blame him. He also has an enormous respect for the
innate musicalty of Shakespeare and mentioned that you need to score in
a way to compliment it, not compete.
On a side note, fans of his Batman music should blame WB for niixing
the Batman and Robin score disc AFTER IT WAS COMPLETED AND READY TO GO!
They didn't want it competing with the song album--pretty ridiculous, I
think.
Lord of the Rings Praise
From: "Caschetto" <caschetto@tiscalinet.it>
I've just noticed on the current issue of FSM that Wojciech Kilar
will compose the music of Peter Jakson's Lord of the Rings Trilogy (good
choice I think).
But it reminded me about another composer who have done yet a great
work on the Lord of the Rings-and I'm not talking about Leonard Rosenman
(who did a great work, anyway).
He is Stephen Oliver, who composed and directed the music for the
Lord of the Rings Radio Drama for BBC.
I've listened to it recently. The radio drama is fantastic, a thirteen
episode saga well played and directed (with Ian Holm as Frodo).
And its music is great and wonderfully... british. The main effort
of the composer is surely the rendition of the songs (lyrics by Toilkien
himself) but also the themes - the one for the journey and the one for
the horn of Boromir than fully rended as the theme of both Rohan and Gondor
are beautiful.
The orchestration are fantastic, a mixture of antique and romantic.
Even if your mag is dedicated to the motion picture and television
music, I think that an essay about Stephen Oliver and his music for the
radio drama of the Lord of the Rings will be interesting for many of your
readers.
Why Promos?
From: "Mike Berman (digiboy)" <digiboy@erols.com>
I have always wondered why companies go to the trouble of recording
promo disks but don't then release them commercially. It seems to me that
a majority of the financing for performance and production work is already
spent in the process of creating a promo CD...why not go the extra step
and put it out on the market? I know that promos don't usually have very
extensive packaging but I've seen commercial scores put out with packages
that are just as skimpy. Why not just release them as is and recover some
of the expenses?
Good point! The answer is because for many projects the production expenses
pale in comparison to the licensing and royalties expenses -- it all depends
on the scale of the production and project. Many promos are produced in
a sort of "gray area" where they are sold anyway in limited numbers
to collectors, and can recoup costs that way... but if they were licensed
for full retail distribution, they'd have no hope of recovering the advance.
Reviews... in German!
See http://www.cinemusic.de for
reviews in German of FSM's All
About Eve and The
Comancheros CDs.
Happy President's Day!
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
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