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In honor of this wacko thread, I finally found the Stromberg/Morgan Fahrenheit recording, which I'd mis-filed and listened to it again. So:
It's a wonderful recording. Period. My guess is Richard W. hasn't heard it - and that's fine. What's not fine is to reference it at all in any post. Period. If he has heard it, he has not bothered to make one single comment on it, so that's why my guess is he hasn't. Doesn't matter in the long run, in the long run he likes the film performance and if he has the bootleg and is satisfied with the awful quality (they're both equally awful), that's fine, too.
As I've said before, IF the tapes exist they would, of course, not be with MGM (also it's a lovely human trait to admit you were in error about the studio, but that's another story), they would be with Universal. If you think Bob Townson or Doug Fake (two people who have managed to get in pretty far with Universal - we hope that will be changing soon) haven't asked for Fahrenheit and had Universal search for it, think again. Of course they have. Clearly at this point, Universal doesn't have it. For example, they have Marnie in stereo. This they don't. As Ford points out, it doesn't matter what you've "heard" - the score was recorded in England - the entire film's production was in England. Are those tapes sitting somewhere in England? Who knows but if they are, certainly no one has found them.
Would I personally like the film recording? Of course. What self-respecting Herrmann fan wouldn't? It is one of his finest scores. Did that keep me from buying the re-recording? Of course not. Why? Because I love the score and would always take a chance. It is no secret that I really do not care for most of the Varese re-recordings - I hate the sound of them save for a couple - North by Northwest for example, where instead of the usual live to two-track washy crap the conductor was finally allowed to MIX from multiple tracks. Even listening to the Faherenheit suite on Varese is, for me, completely irritating due to the live to two-track recording, which basically buries the harps and bells and other percussion in a faraway ambience that robs those instruments of the prominence they should have. I really don't like any re-recordings of the Fahrenheit suite other than Mr. Herrmann's own.
Which brings us to the re-recording of the COMPLETE score. Most know that Mr. Truffaut and his music editor cut up or shortened Mr. Herrmann's original cues, left out certain cues in their entirety, and did what they felt like, which is, of course, their right. Here we have the score as Mr. Herrmann actually wrote it. That wouldn't matter to me if it was poorly played. But it's anything but poorly played - it is excellently played with a real understanding of Herrmann's style. It does not have a concert hall ambience - the orchestral detail, especially in the harps and percussion is gorgeous. Is it a clone of Mr. Herrmann's film performance? Probably not - but probably in the ballpark because I know the diligence of Mr. Stromberg and Mr. Morgan. This was a lovingly done album, not rushed, and the result is one of the best re-recordings ever made. No, it's not the original tracks, but the original tracks are only available in substandard (being kind here) sound and do not contain the cues as Mr. Herrmann wrote them. So, which would I choose to listen to (knowing I am not only a huge fan of the score AND the film itself)? The Stromberg every single time. Would I listen to the original tracks if they came out in sound as good as what Universal has on Marnie (and yes, I have the stereo Marnie) - of course. Would it replace the Stromberg entirely - if it had the complete cues and deleted cues - probably. But we don't have that. And therefore my conclusion is if it's a score that someone loves, the Stromberg/Morgan version is a beautiful representation of it.
And there you have my two centimes. I'm not going to change anyone's mind because the person who began this thread does not want his mind changed. And that's fine, too. It's all fine.
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Bruce, for heaven's sake, stop teasing us with Marnie! You're killing me here.
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Posted: |
May 31, 2015 - 9:12 PM
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By: |
Jim Doherty
(Member)
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Bruce: Your comments are spot-on about Tribute's FAHRENHEIT 451, and the availability of the original stereo MARNIE tracks but not those from FAHRENHEIT.
John Black: MARNIE exsists. I think it was Varese that got a CD together, but dumped it after a bootleg release came out. This was of course stupid, as any Herrmann collector would still have popped for a superior release in stereo, even if they HAD bought the mono boot. So, that one is ready to go if somebody just has the smarts to say "Let's do it."
Ghost of 82: I don't mean to speak for Tribute Film Classics, but I think the reason they are no longer doing things is that the money ran out. The money brought in by the sales was just not covering the outlay of cash needed to produce the sessions.
John, Bill, Anna, Craig... please correct me I'm wrong.
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Jim, did Varese dump the MARNIE original tracks before or after their Joel McNeely rerecording of the score?
Long before.
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Man, if OBSESSION can surface, there's always hope for MARNIE.
Shocking to think how many Herrmann scores have reportedly missing tapes:
THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH?
PSYCHO
FAHRENHEIT 451
ENDLESS NIGHT
THE BRIDE WORE BLACK
TWISTED NERVE?
BATTLE OF NERETVA?
and perhaps others
IT'S ALIVE and ON DANGEROUS GROUND survive, in less than satisfactory elements.
MARNIE and I presume CAPE FEAR survive, but are locked in the Universal vault. Perhaps COMPANIONS IN NIGHTMARE is there too.
No, the Twisted Nerve tapes are here in LA and they're coming from another label - I can tell you the tapes sound great. And from what I was told, Marnie will be coming, too. Of course, I first heard Marnie would be coming over a year ago - when it's finally released, maybe we can all gang up on the label and ask them why on earth it would be necessary to sit on it for a year since it sounds great and was ready to go even longer ago than that. Frankly, I find it infuriating. Same with Twisted Nerve, actually.
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Pleased that MARNIE and TWISTED NERVE will come.
And thanks to Bruce for saying what most of us think or needed to know.
Someone mentioned the number of lost Herrmann scores. Try being a fan of John Barry's 1960-1975 film music. Okay, it's very well represented on truncated but well sequenced soundtrack albums—and album masters tend to survive—but most of the complete original score recordings of his from this era are lost. You want a complete THE LAST VALLEY? Forget it.
Why?
Well, when folks recorded at Fox, or Warner, or MGM in the United States, the people running those studios were seemingly very good at saving their recordings. In the UK, where people recorded at CTS, Denham, etc, if the tapes got shipped back to the film studio, great. Often they didn't. And we know that both CTS and Denham have had clear-outs not to mention floods. Even if tapes were returned to the many independent production companies Barry composed for, those companies typically existed to make one or a few films and then folded.
Sorry folks, it seems recording in England through the 1960s and 1970s was not a great way of ensuring your music recordings got saved.
Cheers
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By the way, to Bruce's point that the horrible sounding bootlegs are NOT the score as composed by Herrmann but the score as is DUBBED by Team Truffaut, suggests that the source is a mono, post-edited, post-sync music only track presumably used to create foreign language versions of the film.
One can definitely hear that cues are edited or faded out.
These kinds of boots are not uncommon but represent zero credible proof that the original master recordings exist. Which is, I think, one of the contentions of the thread initiator.
Cheers
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It's unfortunate, but just a fact of life.
Indeed. Didn't they use Hollywood scores from MGM etc as landfill to create golf courses?
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As I've said before, IF the tapes exist they would, of course, not be with MGM (also it's a lovely human trait to admit you were in error about the studio, but that's another story), they would be with Universal. If you think Bob Townson or Doug Fake (two people who have managed to get in pretty far with Universal - we hope that will be changing soon) haven't asked for Fahrenheit and had Universal search for it, think again. Of course they have. Clearly at this point, Universal doesn't have it. For example, they have Marnie in stereo. This they don't. As Ford points out, it doesn't matter what you've "heard" - the score was recorded in England - the entire film's production was in England. Are those tapes sitting somewhere in England? Who knows but if they are, certainly no one has found them.
This is the sort of information that we (or at least some of us) wish to know.
Universal Studios doesn't have tapes on F451.
However, music & effects stems exist(ed) somewhere ... if these M&E sources are not the property of Universal, then who are the owners of the M&E tapes?
Somebody had them for the Soundstage CD.
Regarding the inventory of existing material which currently exists within Universal, would it be possible to list this information for us potential customers?
I have a feeling there is a lot of music elements @ Universal which some record producers are not asking for because the composers were not "A"-listers.
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It's quite the contrary in the case of Herrmann, as is evidenced by how many of his relatively obscure scores have been released, as well as the enormous wealth of newer recordings of his scores. Herrmann is also a composer that has some “crossover appeal” to other markets.
Most of the time, if a Herrmann score hasn't been released, it's because the elements are missing, or they're owned by an entity that has not made their materials available to the labels.
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Posted: |
Jun 2, 2015 - 12:54 PM
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By: |
Richard-W
(Member)
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haineshisway:
In honor of this wacko thread, I finally found the Stromberg/Morgan Fahrenheit recording, which I'd mis-filed and listened to it again. So:
It's a wonderful recording. Period. My guess is Richard W. hasn't heard it - and that's fine. What's not fine is to reference it at all in any post. Period. If he has heard it, he has not bothered to make one single comment on it, so that's why my guess is he hasn't. Doesn't matter in the long run, in the long run he likes the film performance and if he has the bootleg and is satisfied with the awful quality (they're both equally awful), that's fine, too.
You guess wrong. I have the Tribute CD and yes it's thoroughly engrossing and all the things everybody says it is. But it has been thoroughly discussed and praised to the heavens in other threads. I don't disagree with a word of the praise, I just have nothing to add to it. Every time there is a thread about Fahrenheit 451 it turns into a party over the Moscow Symphony Orchestra's re-recording and the original score is shoved aside. So I started a new thread about the original recording, which I feel has not received enough attention. There was no harm in opening a thread to discuss the original recording and asking whether or not it's been released or if it can be released.
Herrmann's the Fantasy Film Scores was one of the first LP's I ever bought. I no longer have that re-recording on LP, however, but I do have the Canadian CD.
I don't see how anyone can be satisfied with the Soundstage and Tsunami boots. But the sound quality is better than has been represented in this thread or at least is sufficient to suggest just how good an officially released original score could be.
I am interested in collecting Bernard Herrmann's original recordings insofar as is possible. Herrmann is the artist I'm interested in. I want to hear the music he composed and conducted under his own hand because he is the artist I'm interested in. I'm not collecting Joel McNeely or William Stromberg (although there are a few in my collection and no doubt more will be added in time). My interest in Herrmann has been rekindled recently by Twilight Time's blu-ray of Jane Eyre (1944) with its excellent isolated audio track (I have the CD's relating to that film as well). This in turn led to me to start gathering Herrmann's other soundtracks and films, like The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1946). His original recording for that remarkable film is an emotional experience, I can tell you. This in turn led me to, among other things, watching the German blu-ray of Fahrenheit 451:
a film I've always loved and admired but had not seen in over thirty years. Seeing the film again was a revelation in the hi-def transfer. The score is a large part of the film's identity and success and it sounds magnificent. Hearing the score in such clarity was a pleasure. It makes me want to find out how much more there is to the original recording and to hear all of it. I also listened to this edition of the novel, which so far as I know is the only time Ray Bradbury read aloud one of his books:
As a rule, I don't listen to talking books, but this was Ray Bradbury. Now, I'd met Ray Bradbury at various functions (first time in 1975, last time I saw him, but did not meet him, was at the World 3-D Expo in 2006 before he died) over the years and enjoyed an occasional correspondence (about writing, not scoring) but his reading is not the voice I heard in my head whenever I read the novel. Hearing Bradbury's voice changes the story. Montag comes across as more unhappy and afraid than I thought. He is wracked with anxiety, an anxiety that intensifies as the story unfolds. I thought Montag was more confident, never as sad or quite as desperate as Bradbury reads him. Bradbury's voice is the emotional life of the character, and of the book. Anyhow, Bradbury and Herrmann were friends. They talked about the story while it was being filmed and while Herrmann was writing the score. Whatever Bradbury said to Herrmann about Fahrenheit 451, it comes out under his baton in the original recording as heard in the film. Herrmann put himself into the service of communicating Bradbury's intent. McNeely and Stromberg may or may not be superior conductors as some of you have postulated but they weren't there and weren't privy to the mutual understanding these two artists had when the score was created. The score captures the same sense of a man rushing to his doom that I hear in Bradbury's reading. There's a certain inevitability to it, as if Montag's fate is out of his hands even though he's the protagonist who's making it happen. I'm not saying re-recordings don't strive for that same emotion, but I am saying that it's there because Bradbury and Herrmann put it there. The original act of creation is not a trivial thing and is not so easily dismissed as some of you are apt to do in your devotion to the Tribute CD.
haineshisway:
As I've said before, IF the tapes exist they would, of course, not be with MGM (also it's a lovely human trait to admit you were in error about the studio, but that's another story),
That spontaneous little slip was acknowledged up thread. Stop making a big thing out of nothing.
You're building a regular bird's nest in your hair with this tone of moral superiority, Kimmell.
haineshisway:
they would be with Universal. If you think Bob Townson or Doug Fake (two people who have managed to get in pretty far with Universal - we hope that will be changing soon) haven't asked for Fahrenheit and had Universal search for it, think again. Of course they have. Clearly at this point, Universal doesn't have it. For example, they have Marnie in stereo. This they don't. As Ford points out, it doesn't matter what you've "heard" - the score was recorded in England - the entire film's production was in England. Are those tapes sitting somewhere in England? Who knows but if they are, certainly no one has found them.
I never heard of Bob Townson or Doug Fake until recently, don't know them personally, have no way of knowing what they've asked or not asked Universal for, have not speculated on the question, and have no thoughts or judgment on the matter one way or another. If I were an insider and a record producer interested in releasing a certain score, I might check with them personally before making assumptions about what they've looked for or might have found. Names of producers and technical staff drop in and out of the mind because I have other things to keep track of. There is a definite indication on the blu-ray's supplements that Los Angeles was involved in the scoring, but if this is a mistake, it doesn't come from me, it comes from the supplement. This thread was started to elicit precisely that kind of additional information and correction.
haineshisway:
Would I personally like the film recording? Of course. What self-respecting Herrmann fan wouldn't? It is one of his finest scores. Did that keep me from buying the re-recording? Of course not. Why? Because I love the score and would always take a chance.
It never occurred to me to ask you what you would like to have, Bruce. Do forgive. I should have put what you'd like to have at the forefront of my mind when I initiated this thread.
I love the score, too, but I do not always take a chance on re-recordings. I have to be careful what I throw my small disposable income at. Like most people on FSM, I can't afford to buy every re-recording out there. I'm content with the Tribute re-recording; that doesn't mean I want to discuss the Tribute about which everything that could be said has been said in other threads. Now all I want is the original recording in its entirety, if at all possible, or as much of it as can be found, if any. Herrmann's 1966 recording deserves the same respect as the Tribute and as much attention. It boggles my mind when professionals who profess a devotion to a composer and his scores make no attempt to find his original recording or to release it when they find it. Instead they brag about sitting on unreleased tapes to torment people like Sean Nethery who are dying to hear them.
haineshisway:
It is no secret that I really do not care for most of the Varese re-recordings - I hate the sound of them save for a couple - North by Northwest for example, where instead of the usual live to two-track washy crap the conductor was finally allowed to MIX from multiple tracks. Even listening to the Faherenheit suite on Varese is, for me, completely irritating due to the live to two-track recording, which basically buries the harps and bells and other percussion in a faraway ambience that robs those instruments of the prominence they should have. I really don't like any re-recordings of the Fahrenheit suite other than Mr. Herrmann's own.
Check.
Somebody please make a note of the fact that Bruce Kimmell hates all but a couple of Varese's re-recordings for technical reasons that make perfect sense. He's gone on the record.
haineshisway:
Which brings us to the re-recording of the COMPLETE score.
I've repeatedly asked you not to go there, so there you go ---
haineshisway:
... Most know that Mr. Truffaut and his music editor cut up or shortened Mr. Herrmann's original cues, left out certain cues in their entirety, and did what they felt like, which is, of course, their right. Here we have the score as Mr. Herrmann actually wrote it. That wouldn't matter to me if it was poorly played. But it's anything but poorly played - it is excellently played with a real understanding of Herrmann's style. It does not have a concert hall ambience - the orchestral detail, especially in the harps and percussion is gorgeous. Is it a clone of Mr. Herrmann's film performance? Probably not - but probably in the ballpark because I know the diligence of Mr. Stromberg and Mr. Morgan. This was a lovingly done album, not rushed, and the result is one of the best re-recordings ever made. No, it's not the original tracks, but the original tracks are only available in substandard (being kind here) sound and do not contain the cues as Mr. Herrmann wrote them. So, which would I choose to listen to (knowing I am not only a huge fan of the score AND the film itself)? The Stromberg every single time. Would I listen to the original tracks if they came out in sound as good as what Universal has on Marnie (and yes, I have the stereo Marnie) - of course. Would it replace the Stromberg entirely - if it had the complete cues and deleted cues - probably. But we don't have that. And therefore my conclusion is if it's a score that someone loves, the Stromberg/Morgan version is a beautiful representation of it.
So far as I know, no one has denigrated the re-recording on Tribute. So let's stop pretending that someone has. All I've said is that I'm not interested in discussing the re-recording in a thread started to discuss exclusively the original 1966 score. Do the re-recording in the other threads. If you are suggesting the Tribute should be accepted as a replacement for the original, sorry, I must disagree. It isn't, and that's all there is to it.
In a contest of which is better -- if you insist that such a contest is necessary -- the jury is out on the original score because we don't have the complete original to compare it to the complete re-recording. But my intuit based on the partial score and the film's score is that if a complete original were found and released it might very well blow away the Tribute CD.
haineshisway:... yes, I have the stereo Marnie) ...
Fine. Redeem yourself: send it to me. Or stop bragging about it.
haineshisway:
And there you have my two centimes. I'm not going to change anyone's mind because the person who began this thread does not want his mind changed. And that's fine, too. It's all fine.
Such misrepresentations are the reason you get no deference from me, Bruce. Which I'm sure you'll agree is just fine.
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