Film Score Friday 8/3/01

Southern California residents, check out this season's FREE concerts held at the Wadsworth Theatre by the Henry Mancini Institute, two of them guest-conducted by Elmer Berstein (Aug. 4 -- tomorrow night!) and Jerry Goldsmith (Aug. 11) respectively. No tickets, just first-come, first served! See www.manciniinstitute.org.

This Sunday on TNT is the premiere of James Dean, a biopic of the actor directed by Mark Rydell. The score is by John Frizzell...I was kind of hoping for Leonard Rosenman! However, there may be an appearance of an actor playing a young Leonard Rosenman in the picture (I'm not sure but I'll be watching) -- Lenny was James Dean's piano teacher and close friend.

Def Jam/Def Soul have released the soundtrack to Rush Hour 2 (song compilation). Varese Sarabande will have the Lalo Schifrin score album out on August 21st.

Capitol/EMI is releasing a 30th Anniversary edition of Fiddler on the Roof on October 9, featuring a previously unreleased track (the song "Any Day Now," cut from the film). The release will coincide with the October 2 Special Edition release by MGM of the movie on DVD, including a bunch of extras. John Williams was the conductor/music supervisor for the song score, for which he won the first of his five Oscars. (The others came for the scores for Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. and Schindler's List.)

Angelo Badalamenti will appear at the Edinburgh Film Festival on Friday, August 17th to give a talk. See http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk for more information, or http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/2001/films/?_P=PRG011540 to book tickets. Thanks to Pete Murfet for the information.

From: "Ricard L. Befan" <ricard@jwfan.net>

Just a note to let you and your readers know that last Tuesday Williams premiered 4 minutes of music from "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" at the "Tanglewood on Parade" concert, and mentioned that he's already written two-thirds of the score.

Williams conducted a concert arrangement of "Hewig's Theme", one of the major themes of the score, which was also used for the film's trailers. Hewig is (using Williams' words) "the owl who delivers messages from the world of the witches to the world of the muggles - human beings - us."

According to The Boston Globe, the new music "is destined to be one of Williams's greatest hits, an affectionately allusive tribute to great fantasy music of the past - but in his own unmistakable voice"

More reports on the Harry Potter concert premiere along with all available information on the new Williams score can be found at the Harry Potter section of www.jwfan.net.

From: Preston Jones <pjones@fulpat.com>

Thanks for Dennis Logsdon's series on the Telarc cd's. I own a number of them and enjoy them very much; in fact, I agree with all of Logsdon's assessments of the ones I've heard. The sonics and performance of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN on "Chiller" make me wish that it had been Kunzel and company who had recorded that full-score album for Silva. (The one lamentable aspect of "Chiller" is the tasteless intrusion of a woman's screams on the PSYCHO suite. For shame.)

It would be worth while to update this series from time to time. I believe there's a baseball-themed album out now, plus one of Spielberg titles, (mostly written by Guess Who?...)

From: "nick garrod" <garnor@postmaster.co.uk>

Val Vautier's recent comments on the importance of your work in restoring film scores was right on the mark. When I began to collect film music some 25 years ago I never dreamed that one day all this wonderful material would not only become available, but be presented in the best possible guise. One of the first Film music recordings l ever purchased was the Entracte reissue of RAINTREE COUNTY which I suppose could be considered to be one of the first times that anyone had reissued a film score in a 'restored' version (Although the contents were the same as the original 1957 LP issues, it was remixed to produce a true stereo version).

If only work similar to yours had begun at that time then all these wonderful scores from the Fox archives could have been restored with 25 years less deterioration!

Despite that the work FSM and others (BYU, Varese, Rhino) are doing now is invaluable. It is a pity that Messrs. Herrmann, Newman, Steiner, Friedhofer, et al are not around to see the loving treatment being given to their work - I wonder what they would think? Would they be pleased or, perhaps, incredulous that the results of their "just doing my job" are now being treated with such reverence? We shall never know.

From: Barg@filmscoremonthly.com (Jonathan Z. Kaplan)

In response to James Luckard and all the people responding about track 10 of the A.I. soundtrack.

Track 2 is a concert arrangement of the Abandonment theme. The beginning of track 10 is the version used in the film -- but only from the second half of that scene. The music from the first half of that scene is, like much of the early music in the film, not on the album.

These were announced a few weeks ago, but I was must have been watching baseball as I forgot to list them here. Here are the music categories:

Outstanding Music Composition For A Series (Dramatic Underscore)

The Simpsons . Simpson Safari
Alf Clausen, Composer

Star Trek: Voyager . Workforce (Part 1)
Dennis McCarthy, Composer

Star Trek: Voyager . End Game
Jay Chattaway, Composer

The West Wing . Shadow Of Two Gunmen
W.G. Snuffy Walden, Composer

Xena: Warrior Princess . The Rheingold
Joseph LoDuca, Composer

Outstanding Music Composition For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special (Dramatic Underscore)

Bailey's Mistake
Mason Daring, Composer

For Love Or Country: The Arturo Sandoval Story
Arturo Sandoval, Composer

Papa's Angels
Velton Ray Bunch, Composer

Outstanding Music Direction

Barbra Streisand: Timeless
Marvin Hamlisch, Music Director

Christmas In Washington
Ian Fraser, Music Director

The Kennedy Center Honors
Elliot Lawrence, Music Director

My Favorite Broadway: The Love Songs (Great Performances)
Paul Gemignani, Music Director

Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific
Paul Bogaev, Music Director

Outstanding Music And Lyrics

American Film Institute Life Achievement Award: A
Tribute To Barbra Streisand
Song Title: "On the Way to Becoming Me"
Marvin Hamlisch, Music
Alan Bergman, Lyrics
Marilyn Bergman, Lyrics

Dancing In September
Song Title: "Welcome Back (All My Soulmates)"
Mark Sparks, Composer
Sy Smith, Lyricist

Gary And Mike . New York, New York
Song Title: "Mole Folks Song"
Greg O'Connor, Composer
Fax Bahr, Lyricist
Adam Small, Lyricist
Howard Gewirtz, Lyricist

Robert Klein: Child In His 50's
Song Title: "Colonoscopy"
Robert Klein, Composer/Lyricist
Bob Stein, Composer/Lyricist

Yesterday's Children
Song Title: "A Dream That Only I Can Know"
Patrick Williams, Composer/Lyricist

Outstanding Main Title Theme Music

Big Apple
Marc Bonilla, Composer

Gideon's Crossing
James Newton Howard, Composer

Soul Food
Kenneth Babyface Edmonds, Composer
Al Green, Composer

Survivor
Russ Landau, Composer

Thoroughbred
Michael Josephs, Composer

Wolfgang Jahn has updated his site, www.italiansoundtracks.com, to include around 600 LP covers of Italian soundtracks as well as rare items from Japan, Germany, France, the U.S. and the U.K.

Doug Fake has seen fit to write about our new Hugo Friedhofer release, Between Heaven and Hell/Soldier of Fortune, in his weekly column at Intrada. I always love Doug's column because it's very hard nowadays to find a review or columnist on the Internet who does anything beyond summarize the popular attitude toward the score or the liner notes of the album. Doug goes a lot deeper and regularly points out things I missed even though I spent many months working on an album. (For example, the relationship between the love theme and the war motive in Between Heaven and Hell.) See http://www.intrada.com/doug/doug0701.htm.

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com