Intrada Soundtrack Forum

10/19/2021

Treats for Jerry Goldsmith fans. Two of them! Our recording sessions with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow went beautifully. Simply awesome! Coming up ahead you’ll be able to enjoy listening (at last!) to Goldsmith’s very first feature film score, complete in a world class performance. Black Patch turns out to be a much more involved and varied score than the 1957 film soundtrack, often buried under dialog and sound effects, suggests. Standing on its own, the architecture reveals the structural genius Goldsmith applied to his dramatic music, right from the first bar. Speaking of which, here’s a really cool delight: the Warner Bros. film opens with a brooding b&w outdoor shot and Goldsmith’s score begins in a very low key manner. That’s what we all have known and become used to. But he actually scored a powerful opening fanfare for orchestra that he titled “Warner Bros. Presents” (1m1) to accompany the opening image. This has never been heard before and it makes for a sensational opener to the score, introducing one of his key themes right off the bat. Wow! And then there’s that crucial love theme, heard in its lengthiest treatment during “Love Reunited Part 2” (3m1) which is one of the composer’s most haunting. And for those fans wondering about that piece of saloon music that plays under the opening credits, yes, it is by Goldsmith and is titled “Player Piano (Main Titles)” (1m3). And yes again, we are including it. A particular treat is hearing the complexities and ferocious writing in Goldsmith’s very first action cue for a movie: “The Fight” (5m1) with numerous devices that became signatures, including mixed-meter rhythms, staccato snare drums and zigzagging bars of full orchestra excitement.

Ahhhh… on to that second treat. And what a treat! 1972’s The Man, starring James Earl Jones and written by Rod Serling, opens with one of Goldsmith’s most arresting and declamatory cues of his entire career. Called “Douglass Dilman (Main Titles)”, Goldsmith wrote this prelude in a soaring, stentorian vernacular that would have made Aaron Copland proud. Fortissimo brass and percussion in the lead! And for anyone familiar with Goldsmith’s magnificent “The Monument” from Logan’s Run (1976), revel in the gestation of that piece in this score’s “The Lincoln Memorial”, illuminating the same stirring images! And following that music is “The Oval Office’, with imposing music framing all of the portraits of past presidents. What a score!

Both scores will be presented complete, in terrific readings by the orchestra under maestro William T. Stromberg. Using the composer’s actual original scores which survived intact, supervised by Leigh Phillips, who also masterfully reconstructed The Man, everything was recorded and mixed by ace scoring engineer Simon Rhodes, the extraordinary audio wizard behind so many classic James Horner scores as well as our own [i]Dial M For Murder[/i] recording. We’ll keep everyone posted as this fabulous release is readied for release. As they say… stay tuned!