Ok, so where the heck did November go?  It was a short month to begin with, but with a little vacation and a conference thrown in, I am just now getting back to a normal schedule, thanks to a great snowstorm.  You know there's nothing like watching snow fall while listening to music....

It was a busy review month for me, but very few standouts of the piles that came in really made it to my library.  I put off listening to the new Film Score Montly release of Morricone's Navajo Joe until I was home alone.  I had to review Death Rides a Pale Horse a couple of years ago when my wife was home and it was the first time she ever asked how long it would be before something was over.  Navajo Joe opens rather viscerally but really is a great little score that serves as a stepping ground aurally between the more popular Morricone Spaghetti Western scores (i.e. those known to the general film audience) and those which really stretch the musical limits.  So I mention it here because it is a worthy release that I somehow missed commenting on here last month.

For me there were some great re-issues last month in a string of re-issues and limited pressings that seem to one-up one another with each passing week.  BSX's Without a Trace gives fans of Henry Mancini a rare chance to hear one of his later score attempts.  It makes for a fine listening experience and while it seems to where thin towards the end, overall it is a worthy addition to the Mancini discography.  Surely by now there is a way to get some of his great 1960s scores to disc though.

Intrada has to be the label that has had the biggest surprises this year.  They managed to release Monsignor, which is the one Williams score to never receive a CD release (I thought Spacecamp was unreleased but I think it just disappeared from the catalogue).  I reviewed this earlier in the month as a personal favorite of the month.

While at Boston Symphony Hall, I picked up two CDs that are among some favorites for the month.  The first of these was the Pops latest release Oscar and Tony which is a fascinating blend of Broadway and film music.  As is usual with Lockhart's recordings, he manages to find newer selections from some of the Pops standard repertoire pieces so that instead of just getting the "Around the World" walts from that Victor Young score, we get the opening overture; instead of just a theme we have "Remembrances" from Schindler's List (a superb recording of this piece with chorus).  Having heard the orchestra in concert do music by Korngold and Herrmann I had hoped that they would have recorded more of this repertoire, but maybe some day soon that will happen.  Still, this disc, available at the BSO website is the pops at their best.

The other disc I managed to find was the Denon import of Keisuke Wakao playing music by John Williams.  Mentioned earlier in this blog, oboist Wakao plays a variety of Williams' music in performances that somehow just work really well in their chamber settings.  It is not that I would give up their orchestral incarnations by any means, but this disc is a gorgeously recorded musical achievement.

I have been a fan of Alberto Iglesias music for some time, going back to his work for Pedro Almodovar.  His score for The Constant Gardner was a bit of a departure for him, which I think led to its notice because it was different from Hollywood-styled ethnic scores.  In The Kite Runner Iglesias has a high-profile picture with an opportunity to show off some of his compositional muscle.  This he does in a score that captures Afghani musicmaking with its fascinating rhythmic complexity and long delicious melodic contours along with a standard orchestra.  As a disc of orchestral ethnic music, The Kite Runner proves to be the kind of disc that has great crossover appeal and given the bestseller status of the novel, it should find its own audience.  It turns out that this is one of the better scores of the year that should make most lists depending on what awaits us in December.

That said, I am still trying to come up with 5 scores for a list that would be "award" worthy.  I think I am up to 3 that might make the cut, with several that are good but unlikely candidates.  On to December with some new Varese Clubs on the way, Alien just delivered, and some great Herrmann from the Stromberg/Morgan workshop!

This is that time of the year when score releases slow a little bit, ususally.  What has happened is that many of the labels that release older scores have been going full force so much so that it is hard to catch up.

This past week was the 100th anniversary for Miklos Rozsa.  So there was a re-recording from Silva of The Private Lives of Sherlock Holmes and Varese Sarabande released a 3 disc set that of music by Rozsa that I have tried to track down this week.  Film Score Monthly has put out a couple of new releases of music from a couple of Lucy & Desi films on one disc, and a Clifton Parker and Maurice Jarre score on another.  These are remasterings of collectable Colpix LPs.

We had a rental car with XM Radio in it this week, and I got to hear a little from Chris Young's score for Ghost Rider.  It sounded pretty darn good so I'll need to keep up with that some day while looking forward to the score release from Spiderman 3 which releases in a week.

That's about it for today.

Sunday was great because I finally sat through Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).  This is one heck of a long film, but what I realized is that it demands that you pay attention.  Early on a five minute sequence that has Jack Elam trying to keep a fly off his face is just the kind of thing that does more to set character, pace and that false sense of security that is missing from a lot of films these days.  I am so not a Western fan, but this film, and the previous Leone-Eastwood films, are just must see for any film fan.  Plus you get to hear Morricone's great score in its context.  What made me laugh was the way the music would play along in a sequence, then stop to let some action happen in the kind of "rest" rhythm of the music.  Just fascinating.