The Great Fantasy Adventure Album (UltraHD CD review)

Erich Kunzel, Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. LIM UHD 069.

Here’s Erich Kunzel (1935-2009) and his Cincinnati Pops Orchestra doing what they did best, presenting an album of short clips from famous fantasy and adventure movies. Kunzel sold a ton of this stuff, making him one of the best-selling conductors of all time. Telarc originally issued the disc in the early Nineties and the audiophile label LIM (Lasting Impression Music, a subsidiary of FIM, First Impression Music) remastered and released it in 2013. For the kind of thing it is, it’s pretty good.

Maestro Kunzel knew exactly what his listeners wanted and gave it to them, producing over ninety albums of short classical, jazz, and pop-orchestral material for Telarc Records alone. One wonders how he might have fared had he applied himself more often to longer classical works, but we have what we have. In the case of the present album, its presumably tongue-in-cheek title tells it all: The Great Fantasy Adventure Album. Well, maybe not quite all because a lot of what audiences might have considered “great” in 1993-94 we hardly remember today. For instance, can you even recall much about Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood:  Prince of Thieves, let alone its theme music? And although I consider myself a fairly well-informed movie and TV guy, I had trouble placing a short-lived television show called Wizards and Warriors. Nevertheless, there are a few choice items on the program that make the project worthwhile, Kunzel throws himself into the music with enthusiasm (if not always with the best results), and there’s no denying the fine quality of FIM’s remastered Telarc sound.

While much of the music is bombastic and, frankly, noisy, we probably wouldn't want our movie music any other way. The first few things on the program, for instance, are rather blustery affairs: Miklos Rozsa's El Cid "Fanfare and Entry of the Nobles," James Horner's Willow, Lawrence Rosenthal's Clash of the Titans, and John Williams's main themes for Hook seem equally inflated. Yet there are truly inspiring moments on the disc as well, Williams's music for Jurassic Park being one of the best scores he wrote.

And so it goes through twenty-one selections, a few of them purely sound effects, like a dinosaur tromping around and cyber technology ("T-Rex," "Jurassic Lunch," "Cybergenesis"). Among my favorite musical items: selections from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Henry V, The Rocketeer, Beetlejuice, The Princess Bride, The Hunt for Red October, and The Terminator.

Whether you find yourself attuned to Maestro Kunzel's handling of the themes is another story, though. He's certainly more than competent, but inspired? I dunno. Like you, I vividly recall that moment in Jurassic Park when we first saw those amazing CGI dinosaurs on the big screen, Williams's music soaring in the background in glorious Dolby Surround. Today, we take such matters for granted, but back then it was all quite astounding. Maybe it’s the passage of time that has blunted Kunzel's rendition; it doesn't seem to have the same impact I remember from Williams's own interpretation.

Telarc producer Robert Woods and audio engineers Jack Renner and Michael Bishop recorded the album in 1993-94 at Music Hall, Cincinnati, Ohio, and LIM producer Winston Ma and mastering engineer Michael Bishop remastered the tapes in 2013. Yes, Mr. Bishop had the chance to do up his own project utilizing even better mastering methods and equipment and rereleasing the disc using even better transfer technology. The sound is big and bold, like the music, so everything works out well. Telarc's famous bass drum gets an expected workout, and the dynamic range shows off the various special aural effects pretty well. However, even remastered with meticulous care using FIM's UltraHD 32-bit "PureFlection" processing, there's a small degree of upper midrange forwardness I noticed in some tracks, as well as a small degree of thickness around the middle. Still, it's negligible, and I don't think anyone will care. Best of all for me was the newly minted high end, which sparkles, shimmers, and shines.

As always, LIM provide packaging worthy of the product (and its dear price): a glossy, hard-cardboard, Digipak-type folding case; an inner sleeve for the disc, with a static-proof liner; and a bound booklet of notes on the music and its production.

To listen to a brief excerpt from this album, click here:

JJP

Vintage Cinema (CD review)

Erich Kunzel, Cincinnati Pops Orchestra. Telarc CD-80708.

It seems as though every time I’ve read the inside back cover of one of Telarc’s booklet inserts, I found they were using the latest and greatest new audio technology to record their music. This 2008 disc, for instance, says they used a Sonoma Direct Stream digital workstation with DAD AX-24 DSD converters, EMM Labs DSD converters, a Genex 8500 DSD recorder, EMM Labs Switchman MK2 monitored speakers, ATCSM 150 and SCM50, etc., which means little to me except that their sound doesn’t ever seem to change much. Nevertheless, I thought this particular recording from Erich Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops seemed distant, recessed, slightly foggy, and smeared. Maybe it’s just me. I put the disc away for a few days and went back to it later. It still didn’t sound very transparent or detailed. Despite my reservations, it appears natural enough if you’re comparing it to the sound you might hear sitting in the back half of an auditorium, which is maybe the point.

Anyway, the musical content this time revolves around old movie soundtracks from 1933 to 1962, starting, appropriately enough, with the main title and “Entrance of Kong” from Max Steiner’s score for the original King Kong (‘33). This score is appropriate because it’s often thought of as the first-ever complete movie music made expressly to underscore an entire film, music cues, themes, and all. Mostly, the first talkies borrowed pre-established classical music for their backgrounds until King Kong came along, so Kong sort of set the standard for movies to come.

Kunzel goes on to cover things like Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Adventures of Robin Hood, Miklos Rozsa’s Spellbound, Franz Waxman’s Sunset Boulevard, Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant On the Waterfront, Bernard Herrmann’s North By Northwest, and others, twelve tracks in all. My own favorite, incidentally, is Elmer Bernstein’s score for To Kill and Mockingbird, maybe because I love the movie so much and the music seems so fitting.

Kunzel gives all of them the usual Kunzel treatment, sometimes overglamorizing them, sometimes playing them straight. There is never any question about the grandiloquence of the music, though, especially the big tunes like Robin Hood and King Kong, which Kunzel seems to relish. If you’re familiar with Kunzel’s work (and who wouldn’t be, considering he probably recorded more albums than anybody in history), you can safely add this one to your collection.

However, I seem to remember some years earlier Telarc telling us they would never produce an album with less than an hour of content. This one contains only fifty-three minutes of music. Surely, there was room for more. I dunno. As I say, it’s played well enough, and if you’re an old-time movie fan, you’ll find some fine music here. Personally, I don’t much care for little bits and pieces of things, so with sound I didn’t much care for along with it, the disc didn’t impress me. But, who knows, maybe it would impress you more than it did me.

JJP

Titanic: Anniversary Edition (CD review)

Music composed and conducted by James Horner. Also, Gentlemen, It Has Been A Privilege Playing with You Tonight. Original motion picture soundtrack and I Salonisti. Sony 8869191475 2 (2-disc set).

I don't usually listen to or review movie soundtrack recordings because I generally find them dull and repetitive. Motion picture music is fine in a motion picture, where it belongs, but it doesn't often work in isolated bits and pieces. However, I did enjoy this two-disc, 2012 "Anniversary Edition" of music from James Cameron's 1997 Titanic. The first disc contains music composed by James Horner for the film, and a second disc contains salon music of the era from the ensemble I Salonisti. For anyone touched by the film, and that would be millions of people, this new set commemorating the one-hundredth anniversary of the ship's sinking (and the fifteenth anniversary of the movie) should move them even further. And it doesn't hurt that at about this time Cameron re-released the movie in 3-D.

The first disc sets the mood from the beginning with some of the movie's most-familiar music. There follows a series of diverse offerings--vocal, orchestral, and instrumental--that pretty much encapsulate the plot of the story. A few of the highlights include "Leaving the Port," "Unable to Stay, Unwilling to Leave," "A Life So Changed," the Celine Dion best-seller "My Heart Will Go On," and the concluding number, "Hymn to the Sea." There are fifteen tracks in all, and fans of the film will no doubt find them gratifying, if only for nostalgic reasons because they remind them of the movie.

It's the second disc that appealed to me more, titled "Gentlemen, It Has Been a Privilege Playing with You Tonight." It includes songs that the Titanic's salon orchestra might have played on that fateful night, a collection of pop and classical tunes popular at the time. Survivors of the disaster differ on what song the ship's band played as she went down; tradition has settled on a sentimental favorite, "Nearer My God To Thee," but it was more likely "Alexander's Ragtime Band," a number-one hit of the year before the sinking, or possibly "Song of Autumn." The album gives us all three songs, played by the salon orchestra I Salonisti, which consists of five players: two violins, a cello, a double bass, and a piano.  I Salonisti not only play the music for the film, they play the players themselves. They are an elegant and refined group, and their renditions of well-known classics like Strauss's Blue Danube, Suppe's Peasant and Poet, and Offenbach's Barcarole are especially welcome.

Lest the audiophile be worried about the sound, let me assure you that these discs are a cut above most soundtrack recordings. The London Symphony carries out the orchestral chores on disc one, the music recorded at Air Studios Lyndhurst Hall, London, in 1997, and originally mastered at Abbey Road Studios. Moreover, for this 2012 special edition, Sony remastered the sound of the first disc, so the sonics no longer seem so recessed but come out sounding vivid and smooth. The disc uses its deep bass sparingly to good effect.  Still, like most such pop and soundtrack albums, the perspective is fairly flat, with little sense of dimensionality or being at a live event. Of course, we're not at a live event; we're listening to a movie soundtrack.

The second disc of salon music, though, sounds even better than the first disc, more natural and more realistic. I suppose we should expect more transparency from so much smaller an ensemble. Nevertheless, there still isn't a lot of air around the instruments, so, yes, while it sounds more lifelike than the first disc, it also sounds rather one dimensional. It's just that with only five players, it doesn't make much difference.

It's hard keeping a dry eye listening to this stuff, particularly by the last number, so it's no wonder the film made as much money as almost anything Hollywood has ever produced. It probably works best if you've seen the film, but even if you haven't, this partially remastered set is a poignant experience.

The folks at Sony do a good job packaging the discs, too, using a double jewel case and a handsome, stiff-cardboard slipcover. Within the case, you'll find not only an informative booklet but a set of paper drink coasters and luggage tags with various "Titanic" emblems on them. Nicely done.

JJP

Film Spectacular! Volume II (XRCD24 review)

Stanley Black, the London Festival Orchestra. FIM XR24 070.

If you're of a certain age, you may remember the big to-do caused when Decca released its first "Phase 4" recordings during the early years of stereo in the late 1950's. While competitors RCA Living Stereo and Mercury Living Presence were miking their projects as simply as possible, usually using three-mike arrangements that still sound more realistic than anything made today, Decca decided to hang literally dozens of microphones all over the place, practically a mike for every instrument of an orchestra, and then mix them all down to two channels. The resultant sound was nothing like a person would hear in a concert hall, but it sure could impress the ear with its clinical accuracy.

I mention all this because the folks at First Impression Music have remastered one of these stereo extravaganzas, Film Spectacular! Volume II from 1963, using the state-of-the-art audiophile XRCD process pioneered by JVC. Although the new record is just as unrealistic in its presentation, it is even more stunning in its precision, focus, and dynamics than I recalled from the old days. However, according to FIM's producer, Winston Ma, in a refreshingly candid booklet note, it took a little cleaning up to get it to sound the way Winston remembered it. Let me quote what he has to say about the first time he listened to the original master tape Decca sent him: "...the sound was just awful!  What we heard were two concentrated beams of sound energy directed from the centers of the cone drivers of the two speakers. There was nothing in the center fill or ambiance spread of the soundstage. The strings were a cluster of razors and the brass ear-piercing." Apparently, the Decca audio engineers back then had mixed down forty-eight channels to two and then brightened it all up to sound good on early, non-audiophile speakers. But with the help of engineer Paul Stubblebine, Winston used an electronic converter to fill in the center, re-record it, and then fine-tune the sound to modern standards.

To say they succeeded in their efforts would be an understatement. Even though the miking highlights every instrument and the overall sound picture is a bit forward for my taste, one cannot deny that there are few other recordings that match this one for absolute clarity. Forget a realistic setting or a natural tonal balance or anything like a normal stereo spread; this thing puts every instrument front and center in a kind of reach-out-and-touch-it approach. Absolute music purists may not like it, but anyone with a good stereo system will have a ball with it.

Like the album's sound, the contents are a tad iffy, too. Stanley Black plays eight selections of Academy Award-winning music in what may often seem overly romanticized, overly sentimental arrangements that take some of the bite out of the tunes. The main theme from Gone With the Wind and selections from My Fair Lady, for example, suffer the most, using a humming chorus almost too corny for any modern conductor to consider. But Lawrence of Arabia comes up pretty well and The Magnificent Seven is downright...magnificent. Indeed, The Magnificent Seven makes excellent demo material for anyone wanting to show off an audio system. Other tracks include On the Waterfront, Spellbound, Anthony & Cleopatra, and the drippy A Summer Place.

As always, the XRCD processing is impeccable, ensuring a clean, wide frequency and dynamic ranges; and the elaborate packaging in a clothbound case, with plastic booklet pages, and a static-free inner sleeve are attractive. In fairness, though, I prefer a simple Digipak; the business of the inner sleeve is tedious to deal with, and there is always the possibility of getting fingerprints on the disc trying to remove it from and replace it in its liner. In any case, remember that you pay a premium price for such luxuries, and the folks at FIM don't mean their discs for everyone.

JJP

The Golden Age of Hollywood (CD review)

Here Come the Classics, Volume Seventeen. Roderick Elms, piano; Jose Serebrier, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. RPO 017 CD.

I didn't know this: The Royal Philharmonic's own RPO label has a series it's doing called "Here Come the Classics," and they're up to number seventeen, the current volume called "The Golden Age of Hollywood" and devoted, obviously, to the musical scores of classic movies. Conductor Jose Serebrier seems to be having a grand old time with the music, too, treating it as seriously as if it were Beethoven or Stravinsky and providing it with all the color and pizzazz it needs.

The album contains fifteen tracks covering excerpts or suites from eleven films, all of them done up in fine fashion. As for the music, take your pick of favorite scores; here are a few of mine, starting with a nine-minute highlights suite from Max Steiner's Casablanca, with an emphasis on a piano fantasia based on "As Time Goes By," with pianist Roderick Elms.

Another favorite of mine is a four-movement suite from Bernard Herrmann's music for Psycho. The disc provides four separate tracks for various themes--the Prelude, "The Stairs," "The Murder," and the finish. It all sounds quite effective, with Serebrier maintaining a vivid forward thrust.  Eeek! Eeeek! Eeeeek!

Next, Miklos Rozsa's "Parade of the Charioteers" from Ben-Hur is appropriately gaudy and grand. But probably the most-influential music in the set is Erich Wolfgang Korngold's score for the Errol Flynn film The Sea Hawk. The swashbuckling opening theme is so memorable, I doubt that we'd have half the music of John Williams without it.

Then it's on to the movie hardly anyone remembers, Dangerous Moonlight, with the music almost everyone knows, Richard Addinsell's faux-romantic "Warsaw Concerto." Pianist Elms and Maestro Serebrier play it as though Liszt or Rachmaninov had written it, and again it impresses one with its melodic invention.

The program ends with "Tara's Theme" from Max Steiner's score for Gone with the Wind and then Elmer Bernstein's Overture for The Magnificent Seven. In between these items, you'll also hear music from The Big Country, Spellbound, The Guns of Navarone, and Taxi Driver. Serebrier may be aging but he hasn't slowed down, his interpretations as vigorous as the movies' original soundtracks.

The sound, recorded at Waterford Colosseum, London, in 2005 is very big and very wide to match the scope of the movies involved. There's a solid bottom end, if not too deep or strong; a slightly thick upper bass; a smooth midrange; and an extended if somewhat tizzy high end. The latter trait is an odd distraction in an otherwise fine sonic picture, and it left my ears ringing a little by the end of my listening session. The acoustic offers a reasonable sense of depth for the orchestra and a wide dynamic range, too, making a respectable showing on the audio side if you tone down the treble a bit. The catch came when I compared the RPO sound to a similarly themed album I had on hand, Film Spectacular! Vol. 2, a Decca Phase-4 recording from 1963. The older recording, although done up in a much more-expensive remastering from FIM, sounded clearer, cleaner, more dimensional, more dynamic, you name it. And it didn't leave my ears ringing. Maybe if you want the best, you pay for it.

Finally, the RPO disc boasts a terrific set of booklet notes on each of the films and composers represented, which alone may be worth the price of the album.

JJP

Best Film Classics 50 (CD review)

The Great Blockbusters, Favourite Movies, and Baroque Goes to the Cinema. Various soloists, conductors, and orchestras. EMI 50999 6 31673 2 (3-disc set).

I can see playing this three-disc, fifty-selection set as a sort of parlor game: Name that movie. Of course, it isn't all that easy because the discs don't actually contain most of the great theme music of cinema through the ages. Instead, the discs contain mainly music from films of the past four decades. Still, many listeners may find themselves stumped about what music goes with what film.

Here's the thing: Well over half the selections are standard classical repertoire items--warhorses mostly--that filmmakers have used in their pictures, while the rest of the selections are from composers who wrote them directly for the screen. So you get Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" used in Apocalypse Now next to Howard Shore's main theme from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The producers have divided the fifty selections into three categories: "The Great Blockbusters" on disc one; "Favourite Movies" on disc two; and "Baroque Goes to the Cinema" on disc three.

EMI culled the collection from among their many recordings of the past forty-odd years, the performances dating between 1962 and 2005. Naturally, the recordings derive from a number of different soloists, conductors, and orchestras. Let me just mention some of the famous names involved: Sir Adrian Boult, Sir Andrew Davis, Sir Colin Davis (and that's not all the "Sir's"; be patient), James Galway, Lesley Garrett, Andrei Gavrilov, Nicolai Gedda, Richard Hickox, Mariss Jansons, Herbert von Karajan, the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, Sir Neville Marriner, Wayne Marshall, Yehudi Menuhin, Sabine Meyer, Riccardo Muti, Andre Previn, Sir Simon Rattle, Jordi Savall, and Barry Tuckwell, with the orchestras just as numerous.

Naturally, with any collection as large as this one, made up of many bits and pieces, everyone will have favorite tracks. Since I don't want to bore you trying to cover everything, let me just mention a few of my own favorites from the set, either for their musical value or for their sound, sometimes both. The opening track, "Sunrise," from Also Sprach Zarathustra, used famously by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, comes off quite effectively under Klaus Tennstedt and the London Philharmonic. Geoff Love and his orchestra do up the main theme from John Williams's Star Wars in exciting fashion. Plucked from the complete opera comes the "Intermezzo" from Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana, conducted by Riccardo Muti, Francis Coppola having used it in The Godfather III. Then throughout the three discs you'll find Neville Marriner conducting the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, used in Tom Shadyac's Ace Ventura, Pet Detective, of all pictures, as well as in the Farrelly brothers' There's Something about Mary.

From the movie Sideways comes Tarrenga's "Memories of Alhambra," warmly and affectionately played by Christopher Parkening; from Lorenzo's Oil we find Mozart's "Ave verum corpus," again from Riccardo Muti, this time leading the Berlin Philharmonic; from Carrington comes the Adagio from Schubert's String Quartet in C with the Hungarian Quartet; from Elizabeth is "Nimrod" from Elgar's Enigma Variations, with Sir Adrian Boult and the LSO; from Billy Elliot is Scene II, Act 10 from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, with Andre Previn and the LSO; from Someone to Watch Over Me comes Vivaldi's "Gloria in excelsis Deo," with Andrew Parrott and the Taverner Choir and Players; from Gallipoli we hear Albinoni/Giazotto's Adagio in C minor, with Marriner and the Academy again; from Silence of the Lambs comes the "Aria" from Bach's Goldberg Variations, beautifully played by Maria Tipo; from Barry Lyndon is Handel's "Sarabande" from the Keyboard Suite in D minor, with Andrei Gavrilov at the piano; and then from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider there's the Largo from Bach's Keyboard Concerto No. 5, again with Gavrilov. And so on.

Clearly, the EMI audio engineers had their hands full trying to choose recordings made in different locations with different artists at different times, the recordings themselves spanning over four decades, and have them sound somewhat alike. Although I found some of it a little bright and forward, I'd say the engineers did a pretty good job. There are wide dynamic ranges present in most of the selections and excellent clarity and definition. Orchestral depth suffers on some tracks, though, and deepest bass is occasionally lacking. When they are present, however, as in the Star Wars selection and almost anything by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, they are splendid.

JJP