Soundtrax

Jeff Danna's expansive and rhythmic score to RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE, comes out on CD on September 28th from Varese Sarabande.
© Varese Sarabande

Heroes of Heaven, Earth, and Raccoon City

By: Randall D. Larson
Date: Thursday, October 07, 2004

THIS WEEK'S RECOMMENDATIONS

Zhang Yimou's film, HERO, released in Asia in 2002 but debuting in America this summer, is a spectacular visual experience. The film is richly textured in both its color pallet and its sound design. Using spectacular aerobic swordplay and "flying" martial arts stunts to tell a story from diverse viewpoints, RASHOMON-like, the story tells how one man defeated three assassins who sought to murder the most powerful warlord in pre-unified China, illustrating by the differing viewpoints certain deceptions related in the previous viewpoint, until the ultimate truth is made known. Tan Dun's musical score, released on Sony Classical, is an outstanding composition, as intricately textured as the film's astonishing visualizations and as intimate as its character interchanges. Featuring Itzhak Perlman in violin and the KODO drummers of Japan, Dun's score weaves a remarkable tapestry in sound design, from its sinewy violin melodies and eerie, wordless vocals over softly-beaten drums to the deep-throated horns, guttural vocal chants, and pounding percussion music of its battle scenes. The film's comparisons with And Lee's CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON are inevitable, that being the most recent major martial arts films to receive the amount of acclaim that HERO has, but the films are in fact quite different in tonality, texture, and sensibility.

Tan Dun, who also scored CROUCHING TIGER, draws from some of the same wellsprings, but his music for HERO is very much its own piece. Dun often reaches beyond the battle sequences to capture the same kind of philosophical heart that Yimou defines in the film's story. For example, the sumptuous swordfights between Jet Li and Donnie Yen in the chess court, between Maggie Cheung and Zhang Ziyi in the autumnal leaf-field, and between Li and Tony Leung on the mountain lake, are given musical accompaniment reflective of the philosophical underpinnings of martial arts that are depicted between the characters; music that serves to illustrate the inner action more than the outer action; while the larger, more epic battle scenes involving the Emperor's army are scored for broad, thunderous orchestration.

The score is an amazing aural experience and a terrifically heart-felt and intimate composition. [IMG3R]The Chinese and Japanese editions of HERO include as a bonus track a closing vocal theme song composed by Zhang Ya Dong and nicely performed by vocalist Faye Wong, which concludes the soundtrack rather nicely, and in keeping with the Asian cinema tradition of integrated closing theme songs (as opposed to the unrelated pop songs that append many American films). The US soundtrack CD does not include the song.

www.sonyclassical.com

The other notably epic Asian spectacular making the cinema rounds in the US this season is He Ping's WARRIORS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, a thickly hewn and sprawling spectacular less philosophical and much more earthly than HERO but just as compelling. Along the lines of Korea's splendid MUSA THE WARRIOR, this film tells of warfare, intrigue, and honor in the Gobi Desert. (A Japanese emissary is sent to the Gobi desert to execute a renegade soldier. When a caravan transporting a Buddhist monk and a valuable treasure is threatened by thieves, however, the two warriors might unite to protect the travelers. -imdb.com. As with HERO, the 2003 film has been available on Region 3 DVD in Asia for some time). An unusual choice for composer is India's famed Bollywood maestro, A.R. Rahman, who has composed a thoroughly Western styled orchestral score, given cultural echoes through the unique sound of a Chinese erhu. But the approach is thoroughly Western orchestral, a vibrant and lavishly adventurous score, accentuated by large choir, that takes the Asian melody of the erhu and creates out of it a full-blooded adventure theme that gives the film and its story an impressive, larger-than-life sensibility. Like Dun's HERO, Rahman's WARRIORS score is intricately textured, using the array of acoustic sounds in his orchestra to create a depth of orchestration and persuasive range of sound to create a very rich and evocative musical delineation that supports the story's multiple levels. It's often a quite mesmerizing and affecting score.

Sony Music Japan has released the soundtrack CD, which is performed by the Czech Film Orchestra and Chorus. The [IMG4L]CD includes a Chinese version of the main theme song, Warriors in Peace," sung by Jolin Tsai, and an English version sung by Sunitha Sarathy. Interestingly, when Sony decided to market the score in the US and UK (evidently before the film was rushed into domestic release in the aftermath of HERO's success), the label downplayed the soundtrack aspect and released it as Rahman's "first major orchestral piece," ... inspired by "the historic passage known as the silk road," ... "drawn from music he created for the score for the Chinese film, WARRIORS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH." In fact, the American and British CDs are musically identical to the Japanese edition, with the same original soundtrack performance by the Czech orchestra and chorus. The one curious exception being that a Hindi version of the theme song, sung by Sadhana Sargan, replaces the Chinese version appearing on the Japanese CD. All three versions of the song are fabulous.

www.sonyclassical.com

Jeff Danna's pulsating score for RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE, came in this week from Varese Sarabande. See

Jeff Danna's expansive and rhythmic score to RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE, comes out on CD on September 28th from Varese Sarabande.

our interview with Jeff in September 14^th column). The score is built around a frantic motif laced with brief heroic melodies that reflect the vigorous passion of Alice and the initially malevolent machinations of Nemesis both humans programmed and altered by the Umbrella Corporation into something more than human. The score soundtrack recording (as distinct from the song soundtrack on Roadrunner Records), distilled into eighteen compelling cues, is quite a change for Danna, who previously was known more for his sensitive melodies in scores like O, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, and THE GOSPEL OF JOHN. But he is very much up to the challenge. Nowadays, this kind of action film tends to dictate an approach usually a hybrid of electronic synthesis and orchestra and Danna complies but offers his own take on the trend, with orchestral passages riffing through the electronic dissonances to humanize the score and enhance compassion for the characters who are, essentially, peopling a 70-mm video game. The music, on CD, is equally lively and aggressive, with Danna's swirling violins and assaultive horn figures especially potent; "Zombies in Church," "Captured by Umbrella," and the climactic "I Remember Everything" are both standout cues, richly punctuated by terrifically vigorous musical combat. The score has its subdued moments, as in the quiet motif that turns into a tremendous upsurge of relentless oppression in "Umbrella Is Watching," the mysterioso of "Ashford's Plan," and the passionate and melancholy "Searching for Alice." Some cues near the end of the CD, like "Beneath the City" and "Search the School," inevitably become a bit monotonous due to the recurrence of the same motifs, but on the whole the soundtrack is a pleasingly energetic action score, well integrated and controlled.

www.varesesarabande.com

FILM MUSIC NEWS

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. this fall, Film Score Monthly completes its trilogy of U.N.C.L.E. albums with a final two-CD set of music from both the original series and its 1966 spin-off, THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E. GIRL featured some of the earliest dramatic work of composer Dave Grusin who would go on to Oscar-winning film-music fame and commercial success as a jazz artist, as well as music by MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E. favorite Richard Shores and MUNSTERS composer Jack Marshall. Supplementing the jazzy, fun GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E. scores are a wide variety of selections from all four seasons of THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., including unusual (and, in one case, previously unused) Jerry Goldsmith tracks and more music by Morton Stevens, Walter Scharf, Lalo Schifrin, Gerald Fried, Robert Drasnin and Richard Shores; stereo mixes of the first-season main title and THE GIRL FROM U.N.C.L.E. titles; music from four of the U.N.C.L.E. movies; and perhaps most exciting, 37 minutes of Jerry Goldsmith's best first-season U.N.C.L.E. music as re-recorded for the series' 1967-68 season in stereo!

www.filmscoremonthly.com

Australia's Reel Music Down Under has released, for the first time anywhere, the late Fred Karlin's science fiction [IMG5R]score for FUTUREWORLD (1976, the sequel to WESTWORLD). The deluxe, full-color 24-page booklet contains substantial film stills and production design sketches from MGM archive, plus the extensive liner notes by the orchestrator, Bill Boston, sound engineer, Michael J. Stern, and composer Karlin. It also contains a 12:42 WESTWORLD suite created by the composer using the original soundtrack materials (the original WESTWORLD score, by the way, was released in 2000 by the now-defunct Chapter III Records). The CD was pressed in limited quantities of only 3,000 copies and may not be available for long check the online retailers notes at the end of the column.

Hans Zimmer and Nick Glennie-Smith have recently collaborated on the score for LAURAS STERN, a German animated film directed by Piet De Rycker and Thilo Rothkirch. The soundtrack has been released this week on the Jack White label, distributed in Germany by BMG.

-via musicfromthemovies.com

As posted on the John Williams Fan network (www.jwfan.net), director Brian Singer has revealed in an interview with the Washington Square News that composer John Ottman will use parts of Williams' original score in the new SUPERMAN movie. "Much of the resonance in the first SUPERMAN film stemmed from the subtle elements of its design," the story states. "Singer, a fan himself of the Donner film, recognizes that certain aspects must be preserved in this newest addition. He plans to extract parts of the original score, and the costume will need no major revamping."

Sony Music has released a new CD by Yo-Yo Ma, the famous cellist, who collaborates with the even more famous Maestro Ennio Morricone on this Sony Classical recording, Yo-Yo Ma Plays Ennio Morricone, The CD features original cello and orchestra arrangements by Morricone of his most popular themes from such films as THE MISSION, CINEMA PARADISO, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY, THE UNTOUCHABLES and many more.

Varese Sarabande reports delays in shipping their Fall CD Club releases (THE GREAT ESCAPE, FITZWILLY/THE LONG GOODBYE) for those who also ordered the advance release of Jerry Goldsmith's GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY or the unreleased TIMELINE score, mainly due to faulty SACD masters received from the pressing plant. A serious software error at the plant resulted in a six-week delay in receiving acceptable masters for the two SACD releases, and orders that included either or both of those CDs have been delayed. The CDs are, reportedly, being shipped this week. The third CD Club release, PIRANHA, has been sold out since shortly after it was announced.

Varese Sarabande released this week James Horner's score for the new horror offering, THE FORGOTTEN. Look for a review coming up in the next week.

Musicfromthemovies.com reports that Christopher Young's next score will be for the Queen Latifah comedy, Beauty Shop, which is kind of a spin-off of the BARBERSHIP movies. Young, who's only scored a couple of comedies (THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and THE BIG KAHUNA, for example), will begin working on the score following his horror score for THE GRUDGE (Varese Sarabande, by the way, will release that score on November 9^th), the music for Lasse Hallstrom's drama AN UNFINISHED LIFE and the Robert de Niro thriller HIDE AND SEEK.

A week in advance of their Special Edition DVD release, Walt Disney Records has issued a special edition soundtrack of the music from their 1992 animated feature, ALADDIN. The new release includes all 21 tracks (songs and score) from the original release, plus a pair of demo recordings of two deleted songs, "Proud of Your Boy" and "High Adventure," written by the Award-winning team of Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. The two-disc DVD set includes "Proud of Your Boy" in both animated and newly-recorded music video format.

Another DVD-soundtrack tie in, Sony has released all three John Williams soundtracks to the original STAR WARS trilogy as individual titles as well as a boxed set containing all three discs. Content of the releases is the same as the 1997 RCA special edition CDs they've just been repackaged for resale, the enticement, I suppose, would be the built-in bonus collectable screen-savers in each package. Also, the extensive liner notes of Mike Matessino have been evicted from the new releases, replaced with posters. Despite the CD label reading "newly remastered with DSD multichannel surround sound," the CDs offer no real substantial sound improvement over RCA's original 1997 releases.

French composer Normand Corbriel, who's been scoring stateside TV-movies and the like since the late 1990s, is set to score the Dean Koontz-scripted TV-movie remake of FRANKENSTEIN for director Marcus Nispel (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, 2003). The movie will debut on the USA Cable Network on Sunday October 10^th.

The latest classic film score restoration from the team of William Stromberg and John Morgan for the Marco Polo label is Max Steiner's 1944 score from THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN. The release is issued both on CD and on DVD Audio.

Percepto records reports that all titles from the label's Vic Mizzy catalogue, excluding THE GHOST AND MR. CHICKEN and the upcoming release of THE RELUCTANT ASTRONAUT, will be placed on moratorium and discontinued through Percepto Records as of Friday, October 15, 2004. Remaining stock may be available until exhausted through the usual retailers. www.percepto.com

Musicfromthemovies.com had posted a long list of upcoming film scoring assignments of which here are some of the most notable genre offerings:

Klaus Badelt: CURIOUS GEORGE

Marco Beltrami: CURSED

Ramin Djawadi: BLADE: TRINITY

Pino Donaggio: SEED OF CHUCKY

Patrick Doyle: HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE

Randy Edelman: SON OF THE MASK

Danny Elfman: THE CORPSE BRIDE, CHARLIE AND THE

CHOCOLATE FACTORY

George Fenton: BEWITCHED

Michael Giacchino: THE INCREDIBLES

Harry Gregson-Williams: THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION,