Intrada Soundtrack Forum

The 1961 film version of West Side Story is probably one of my favorite adaptations of of a stage musical score to film. With a largely augmented orchestra, it leads to an awesome experience when listening to the film version compared to the traditional Broadway version with an orchestra of only 32 players.

With the upcoming 60th anniversary of the original Robert Wise film and the release of the Steven Spielberg remake in the same year, I think this would be an appropriate occasion to have a 2-CD release of the complete body of music recorded for the original film back in 1961. The original LP release of the soundtrack featured all of the major songs, but left out most of the underscoring, apart from the "Prologue" and the Mambo from the "Dance at the Gym" sequence. A few issues with this release were that the prologue was cut down by about 4 minutes in length, and a few of the songs/pieces sounded almost as if they were directly "ripped" from the film itself, with all of the dialogue and sound effects in tact, which made for an unenjoyable listening experience. In the early 90s, we got a somewhat expanded release on CD featuring the overture, intermission music, the complete "Dance at the Gym" sequence, the finale, and the end credits music. However, the cut-down version of the prologue was still present, and some songs (especially "Cool") still retained all sound effects (stomping, clapping, shouting) heard in the film, which is very distracting.

I'm not entirely sure if the original masters still exist (The blu-ray has a 7.1 DTS mix so I don't know if that hints at anything), but I think it would be really sweet to have a complete restored release of this score for the 60th anniversary of the film, including all of the music that was recorded for the project and to focus entirely on the music (I don't mind small portions of dialogue leading into or over songs, but if I wanted all of the excess sound effects I would just watch the movie itself).


Fun fact: To the best of my knowledge, John Williams is the principal pianist on this recording of the score

Interesting suggestion.
Unfort, for score fans, this is one off the biggest selling Lps in HISTORY!.
So, CBS doesn't have much incentive to supplant TWO versions .

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujMSjXiRpOI