Thanks danbeck - that's very useful information. I didn't know until just recently that the old Varese LP/CD wasn't actually in film order. I just took it for granted back then that it was, or more likely I didn't even think about it.
I'm still hearing a fade-out (maybe not "abrupt" as I previously stated) at the ends of tracks 11 and 13. Interesting to see that one of those finished Side A of the LP, so it's kind of logical in that context. Can you tell me if there were gaps - even short ones - between each cut on the LP, or if it mostly kind of ran as the "suites" it was labelled as?
I'm going to have to "unlearn" the old LP which was burnt into my memory and, rather than re-programme the new Quartet, just play it to death so that I get used to it in film order. It is great music after all.
Can you tell me if there were gaps - even short ones - between each cut on the LP, or if it mostly kind of ran as the "suites" it was labelled as?
There are very short gaps (probably less than a second) between the cues (they do not overlap) except “Touch It” and “Entering the Castle” that were joined and “Fighting The Soldiers” that merges several of the choral battle cues (as it remains in the album program - the main loss here is that in this merging it excludes the finale of “Varna Getting Away” and the begining of “Silence” that can be heard on the film program tracks).
Thanks again danbeck. I'm beginning to like the memory of the old LP more and more. I really must get over that. The Quartet's the one I've got, and the only one I'll be getting. It's still great music, but it's hard to unmemorize things.
I never owned the old Varese album so I think I only know this score from this new CD and the previous one, the Prometheus. As I am a fan of original album presentations, I might have to try out that track sequence!
Got the 4K restoration of the movie (its a guilty pleasure) and the color grading is indeed terrible. There's a yellow tint over the movie that makes it very unnatural looking. Blu Ray.com gave the video 2 stars and I agree with them. A missed oportunity as sharpness and detail are very good. https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Red-Sonja-4K-Blu-ray/316640/#Review
The sound however is very good (and Blu Ray.com complies that no original "mono" audio is provided but in fact this film was released in Dolby Stereo in 1985).
Great news (for me) - It's finally happened. I've played the Quartet album tracks so often that they have obliterated the memory of the original LP album track order from my mind! This is such a listenable score. No long stretches of boredom whatsoever, and very little of "annoyingly quirky" Morriconeisms!
I've played the tracks from the film stems only twice I think. I might persevere, but at the moment the extra music seems so little, and the sound quality so much poorer than the "same" tracks on the album programme (no offence to Chris Malone) that I see myself being pulled back again and again to the album tracks.
