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I add my voice to the present chorus.
And a loud voice it is...time for my big solo:
The Big Country is a perfect film with a perfect score!
This is one I have to watch at least once each year, and the score finds its way into my CD player at least once a month.
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Yes indeed, that's a keeper! It's one of my all time favorite scores. I got the film on DVD after listening to the score for a week. It's a very good film, though for me it kinda peeters out at a certain point, but the score is one of the best western scores ever.
If that got sent by mistake, that's what you call a "happy accident."
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received this CD by mistake (it was supposed to be another one by Moross). Since I am unfamiliar with the film (and therefore the music), I have a question for my friends out there...should I return it or keep it? It is the same price as the one I was supposed to get, so...What kind of score is it? Opinions, please?
Thank you in advance...
the filmscore gal,
Galina 
OK, no one seems to have asked this question:
Which version of THE BIG COUNTRY did you get?
The soundtrack recording or the Philharmonia recording on SILVA?
Ford A.Thaxton
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Or the original mono soundtrack?
It's really the one to get.
My prediction: the store's error is a piece of wonderful serendipity guaranteeing that THE BIG COUNTRY is but the first of many Jerome Moross CD's that will find their way onto Galina's shelf.
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Along with Copland's THE RED PONY and Elmer Bernstein's THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, it's screen musical Americana at its most sublime.
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"Since I am unfamiliar with the film (and therefore the music), I have a question for my friends out there...should I return it or keep it?"
Should you keep it? It's only quite possibly the greatest film score ever written!
In my opinion, the Bremner/Philharmonia recording is definitely the version to get. Hopefully, however, your version is NOT the new, remastered HDCD version with the orange cover, as it features an inferior performance of the main title and far worse sonics than the earlier two CD versions on Silva.
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As wonderful as Moross's score is, I'd have to disagree on both counts. "Greatest ever" is fulsome praise for just about anything, and Bremner's performance, like his recordings of Franz Waxman's work, is rather slow and plodding and overly careful.
I do hope that Messrs. Stromberg and Morgan will get around to doing something of Moross's someday, preferably a complete WARLORD.
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James Fitzpatrick is the (long dead) guy who made those Technicolor MGM travelogues you see on Turner Classic Movies at Four A.M. (Did he do one that began "Now we come to the lovely, enchanted Valley of Gwangi, with its unusual fauna, found nowhere else on Earth..."?)
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