Symbolica, an elaborate new dark ride, opens at the Efteling park in the Netherlands this weekend with a beautiful orchestral score by Rene Merkelbach. Three tracks, including the main theme as it is heard as background music around the exterior of the attraction, are available to download here:
Efteling has been pretty good about releasing its park music and I am hopeful that the full score of this attraction will soon come out on cd.
Replying to my old post from 6 years ago -- Efteling has finally gotten around to releasing an album of the complete music from Symbolica, for those who might be interested. It is available on all streaming platforms.
The Puy du Fou theme parks in France and Spain, which offer immersive historical environments, have commissioned beautiful cinematic scores to accompany their spectacle-type shows. In recent years, the scoring duties for the original French park and the new Spanish park have gone to Swiss composer Nathan Stornetta, sometimes working in collaboration with British composers Samuel Pegg and Martin Batchelar, and much of their work has also been released. They produced a stupendous amount of original music for the opening of Puy du Fou España in the spring of 2021, including for the shows “Cetrería de Reyes” (“Falconry of Kings,” featuring live birds), “El Último Cantar” (“The Last Song”, telling the story of El Cid), “A Pluma y Espada” (“The Pen and the Sword,” the swashbuckling story of Lope de Vega), and “El Sueño de Toledo” (“The Dream of Toledo,” a grand historical epic with 200 actors). They also scored “Allende la Mar Océana,” (“Beyond the Ocean Sea,” a walkthrough attraction telling the story of Christopher Columbus’s voyage on the Santa Maria). For the French park, several of Stornetta’s scores have been released: “La Signe du Triomphe” (“The Sign of Triumph”) and “Le Dernier Panache” (“The Last Panache”), as well his finale to “Le Bal des Oiseaux Fantômes” (“The Dance of the Phantom Birds,” a bird show that has a soundtrack mostly made up of needle-drop selections from various film scores).
I can’t recommend this music highly enough! I really think it should be better known to film score fans. And while the cds are hard to come by, fortunately the albums are almost all available to stream or download from the usual online outlets. I’ll provide a few links to several cues to give you the flavor of the music:
