Ok maybe disst is the wrong word (actually don't think it's a word at all), but I think it's the Rodney Dangerfield of 50's epic scores. Recently listened to Rota's War and Peace score (1956) and found myself truly loving it. It gets lost among all the great Rozsa, Kaper, Newman and Waxman costume epics of the time. Unfortunate because it's wonderful and imho deserves a good sounding rerelease or rerecording. Not likely I know but just wanted to give it some love.
I've long lobbied for a full re-recording of this great score but I don't think it's likely to happen, at least not in the near future. Rozsa and Herrmann get the lion's share of new recordings these days, and thanks to James Fitzpatrick's devotion to the work of Maurice Jarre we've had a bumper crop of his music in new renditions lately. I suspect it will be a while before we'll see another Steiner recording from Tribute given the economy and the dwindling audience for anything but the most high-profile Golden Age titles. Tiomkin seems to have a booster in Luc Van de Ven, but so far only for his epic scores. Are we likely to get a disc of Tiomkin's music for the Hitchcock films? Time will tell but I'm not going to hold my breath.
I'm very, very happy for any good re-recordings of film music and I buy almost all of them (and I'm sort of amazed that any of them are being done at all), but I don't think Rota is high on any producer's list for lavish new recordings, sad to say. I'd love to be proven wrong, though!
Those strings sound dreadfully synthy to me, CK. And I don’t generally like scores that inject La Marseillaise (or Rule Britannia, or Star Spangled Banner, or whatever) as shorthand or emphasis, but any Rota is worth a listen, whatever the source.
Rota’s score for WATERLOO is like a sister score to WAR AND PEACE. It even recycles one of the dance themes for a ballroom sequence.
Though it clearly has a logical location for an intermission, I’ve never been able to determine if it had Overture, Entr’acte, or Exit music cues. According to the book, “Roadshow,” it was. I’ve seen photos of scenes not in any version I’ve ever seen; maybe a longer roadshow version was cut for length.
It would be great if a re-recording could include missiing cues, though, as noted above, a lack of general interest would seem to preclude that.
