Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo Favorite Film Scores

Hated disco, but the BeeGee's were great pop writers...
Sabbath Night Fever.

Haven't seen Platoon for years, but I recall it had some good tunes in it.

It WAS the soundtrack of my late 60's life!

Think we're off mark here. CV's looking for (instert yawn)
orchestral pieces.

off the top of my head...either for listenabilty on their own, or just worked REALLY well with the film.

Dances with Wolves
The Mission
Batman Begins
True Romance

Wizard of Oz?

Leonard Cohen ruined McCabe and Mrs. Miller for me.

Check out scores by Michael Kamen. Like Elfman (Oingo Boingo) he was in a tri-state-based band called New York Rock Ensemble (all four Julliard grads). He just died lsat year. Was very in-demand for a long time in LA

CV and all,

If you or anyone is interested in hearing some exciting orchestral movie scores, look for a CD called "Now, Voyager: Classic Film Scores of Max Steiner." (RCA Victor 0136-2 RG)

Steiner was an Austro-Hungarian who came to Hollywood and scored hundreds of movies, including "Gone With the Wind" and "A Summer Place".

His movie scores are highly melodic, lush, with lots of mood changes. The RCA disc is one of the early CDs re-mixed for Dolby Surround and decodes really well in DPLII, etc.

Besides, Now Voyager, other movie scores on the CD include the original King Kong, The Big Sleep, The Informer, The Fountainhead, Johnny Belinda, Four Wives and Saratoga Trunk. Most of those movies are before my time, but some are great.

Another talented composer for film was Erich Korngold. His score for "The Sea Hawk" was engineered by a friend of mine, the late John Eargle (who wrote the definitive book on studio recording and mike placement.) He engineered the CD specifically for Dolby Surround playback and was one of the earliest such CDs. It's on Delos 3234. Oregon Symphony conducted by James De Priest.

Regards,
Alan

Thanks for all of the great suggestions. I'll have to look into some of these. Alan, it's nice to know about the sound quality of your recommendations. If anyone can verify the quality of the recordings of their favorite soundtracks, that would be great.

Also, I know the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack has come up before. Which was the version to get again?

As for me only looking for orchestral pieces, that's not necessarily true. It's simply what sparked my looking into film scores.

Charles, if you're talking about getting the scores and not the movies themselves, I have a fair number of CDs of soundtrack music which is to some extent of a "classical" nature(maybe the best classical music composed in the last 50 years or so). I'd second Alan's suggestion of the scores of Max Steiner and Erich Korngold, but at this point I'll recommend some of Bernard Herrmann's work. Two fine CDs at the top of the list are his weird/beautiful music for The Day The Earth Stood Still and a collection of excerpts from several scores played by the LA Philharmonic .