Troll (2006)
© Intrada
Trolling
By: Randall LarsonDate: Thursday, January 11, 2007
THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATION
Richard’s Band’s 1986 score for Troll remains one of the best and most ambitious of his career. Released only on LP from Restless Records and quickly evaporated into oblivion, the score has remained unavailable until now, with Intrada’s 2006 limited edition re-release (limited to just 1200 copies, and surely very soon to sell out).
John Buechler directed the horror fantasy which starred Michael Moriarty, Shelley Hack, Sonny Bono, and June Lockhart. The film has to do with a wicked troll king seeking a mystical ring that will return him to his human form. He invades a San Francisco apartment complex where a powerful witch lives, and mayhem ensues (interestingly, the father of the family the Troll menaces is Harry Potter Sr. and it is son Harry Potter Jr. who fetches the assistance of the witch, June Lockhart).
The orchestral score is characterized by a provocative use of choir – the soundtrack album, in fact, rather than being a traditional collection of score cues, Band assembled the whole thing into five extended choral suites, allowing the music to play as an extended symphonic work. Troll is simply an astonishing score and characteristic of Band’s flagrant use of unfettered creativity even when restricted by the lowest of budgets.
Band described the score to me in 1987 as “a very magical sounding score. It was done with orchestra, choir and electronics, and it turned out just sensational. [It’s] a very magical quality type of score with a chorus and song in the middle of it that has to do with the creatures.”
Band’s score is built around a rhythmic orchestral figure representing the Troll; it is malicious and malevolent, playful and profane. The motif recurs in fragments and in full form throughout the score, forming in sinews and wisps between evocative keyboard-and-harp passages, given elaborate mystical ambiances through high end choir tonalities offset by low piano notes (opening measures of “Cantos II” and “Cantos IV”), and it surges to full-blooded life in “Cantos V,” where Band really lets go and allows the music to reach a fever pitch, surging forward and snaking rhythmically to a magnificent crescendo.
The chorale interworking of the boy’s song in “Cantos Profane” is a striking chorale adventure musically contrasting innocence with malice and emphasizing the emphatic power of Band’s choir material. A wonderful violin melody emerges about four minutes in on “Cantos IV,” nicely contrasting this premise once more – purity versus malignancy. Band’s score can almost be considered a tone poem as it thoughtfully considers the balance between each end of the spectrum. Woodwinds and strings over nicely reverberated harp proffer a compelling mysterioso later in the same track.
Troll is a richly atmospheric score, a beautifully textured mixture of orchestra, synths, and choir, built around layered and stirring rhythms that allow the music to crescendo and rest repeatedly. While some film music purists may decry the lack of specific cues that can be associated with specific moments in the film, the album’s long-form format is well-suited to listenability, and I’ve always felt this was one of the most provocative and affecting low-budget scores of the 1980s. Many thanks to Intrada for providing it on CD for the first time.
FILM MUSIC NEWS
Varese Sarabande will release Christopher Young’s for Ghost Rider, the new comic book adaptation from Daredevil director Mark Steven Johnson, on February 13th. Also set for release that day is Scott Glasgow‘s score for the animated feature, Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles, and Stuart Matthewman’s music for The Astronaut Farmer, a drama from filmmakers Mark & Michael Polish. In honor of what would have been Jerry Goldsmith’s 78th birthday on February 10th, Varese will also package his three final scores (all previously released by the label), into a specially compiled 3 CD set: Star Trek Nemesis, Timeline (the rejected score) and Looney Tunes: Back In Action.
Film Music Radio has received confirmation from New Line Cinema that French composer Alexandre Desplat has been hired to score the studio’s big budget adaptation of the Philip Pullman novel His Dark Materials: The Golden Compass, an epic fantasy adventure starring Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig, and Eva Green. This is the acclaimed composer’s biggest project to date, in terms of the film’s budget, and also his first fantasy film score – together with the upcoming Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium. Both films are scheduled to premiere late this year. His Dark Materials is based on the first of three books by Philip Pullman and it’s directed by Chris Weitz, who helmed About a Boy and wrote the screenplay for Antz. Alexandre Desplat, who recently won the Los Angeles Film Critics Award and is nominated to a Golden Globe for The Painted Veil, also scored Hostage, Firewall, Syriana, and others.
- via filmmusicradio.com
Tadlow Music continue to produce high quality re-recordings of classic film scores, with previous titles so far including Dimitri Tiomkin’s The Guns of Navarone and Elmer Bernstein’s True Grit. In a couple of weeks The City of Prague Philharmonic, under the baton of Nic Raine, reconvenes for Tadlow’s third such recording, Miklos Rozsa’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Rozsa’s score, which was based on portions of his 1950s Violin Concerto, has never seen an official album release so this new recording will be a welcome treat. Tadlow will press the album for an April release, coinciding with what would have been the composer's 100th Birthday. – via musicfromthemovies.com
The recent remake of Black Christmas, which features the final score by the great Shirley Walker, features an unusual dedication to the late composer. During the end titles when the credit "Produced by Glen Morgan & James Wong" appears, the words "Goodbye, Shirley" appear on the upper right of the screen. Morgan & Wong were Walker's most loyal collaborators, and they worked with the composer on Willard, the Final Destination trilogy, and the TV series Space: Above and Beyond and The Others.
- via filmscoremonthly.com
Although he remains best known for his film music and compositions written for his own ensemble, orchestral music has been at the forefront of Philip Glass’ activities for much of the last two decades. Having achieved success in 1993 with his Low Symphony, a reworking of David Bowie and Brian Eno’s classic rock album Low, three years later Glass repeated the experiment with another Bowie/Eno collaboration, Heroes, an album that drew its inspiration from the then-divided city of Berlin. Naxos has released a new version of Philip Glass Symphony No. 4, "Heroes"/The Light. The six movements of Heroes Symphony function as independent pieces that between them build into a self-sufficient musical work. The Light has its inspiration in a very different source: the Michelson-Morley experiment confirming the uniform speed of light. Seeking a musical corollary, Glass’ piece has an expressive introduction followed by an energetic main movement: a ‘before’ and ‘after’ mirroring the onset of modern scientific research.
http://www.naxos.com/catalogue
Mark Snow, former X-Files/Millennium/Smallville
http://www.musicfromthemovies
Finding Kraftland © 
Official site: http://findingkraftland.com/
FILM MUSIC BOOKS
Not too many new books about film music came out in 2006, but one of the best in recent years was David Huckvale’s comprehensive James Bernard, Composer to Count Dracula, published by McFarland. Few composers in the horror genre are as worthy of a book-length treatise as is Bernard, and Huckvale peels back the layers to reveal the modest gentleman behind the beastly baton. With an introduction by Ingrid Pitt (for whom Bernard never actually composed a Hammer score, despite mutual admiration for each other’s work; Bernard scored Pitt’s short 2000 film, Green Fingers, shortly before his death), Huckvale’s 311-page hardback book is as much biography as musical appreciation of Bernard’s work. Without overemphasizing his horror scores as the expense of his other musical output, Huckvale details Bernard’s life from his early struggles as a musical student and his work in theater, how he met Hammer’s ubiquitous musical director John Hollingsworth while both were in the RAF during World War II, and how he emerged from scoring Hammer’s very first science fiction effort, The Quatermass Xperiment (aka US: The Creeping Unknown) in 1955 to rise to acclamation as one of horror music’s most definitive and distinctive voices. Bernard’s powerful scores for The Curse of Frankenstein, The Horror of Dracula, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Gorgon, and many others remain among the most provocative horror scores of all time, and continue to show their influence on today’s horror film composers.
James Bernard's book © McFarland Publications
My own memories of Bernard, whom I interviewed several times and who was generous enough to write the introduction to my own book on Hammer’s horror music (Music from the House of Hammer, 1996), are of an exceptionally kind and mannered gentleman whose personality and generosity belied the tremendously dramatic and powerful music he composed. I think David Huckvale does him proper justice in this book. James Bernard is the Christopher Lee of film composers, and his work and life are well deserved of this book-length analysis.
Next week:
The best Soundrax of 2006: Reissues, Restorals, Compilations
Recommended Soundtrack sources:
www.arksquare.com/index_main
www.intermezzomedia.com/ (Italy)
www.moviemusic.com
