INTRADA Announces:
THE FIRST OLYMPICS
ATHENS 1896
Composed and Conducted by BRUCE BROUGHTON
INTRADA Special Collection Volume 74
The 1984 Sony TV miniseries The First Olympics - Athens 1896 aimed to recount the tale of American glory at the first modern Games. Produced by Larry White, the mini-series featured a a cast that included David Ogden Stiers, Angela Lansbury, Honor Blackman and a young David Caruso, with a story spanning three continents. The First Olympics provided composer Bruce Broughton with a broad canvas, both in scope and time -- it spanned two nights with five hours to unfold its tale.
Although the resulting score incorporates elements from various nationalities—Irish, Italian and especially Greek—Broughton chose to focus most of his efforts on a strong main theme that would serve the dual purpose of uniting the film’s large and diverse cast, while summoning the spirit and tradition of the Games. It’s a classic Broughton theme -- at one point, like a runner jumping hurdles, the melody leaps by successively higher intervals, culminating in a full octave. “The main theme had that sense of continuation, endurance, practice and achievement, all things that take time. The phrases more or less flow and then succeed themselves,” as Broughton described his theme.
Intrada presents the premiere release of the complete score to The First Olympics on this 2-CD set. CD 1 offers all of the original “background” music written for both parts of this five-hour miniseries. CD 2 offers all of the “source” music written, adapted and/or conducted by Broughton, much of which appears during the games that are featured in part two. Broughton wrote several original marches for band, respectfully tipping his hat to Sousa and “The Liberty Bell” in particular, as well as writing a handful of his own bugle calls and trumpet fanfares. He also scored several charming pieces for piano, violin and cello that appear throughout Part One of the show. Following the source music on CD 2 is a suite of seven sequences selected by Broughton after the scoring sessions. While they duplicate material on CD 1, session engineer Keith Grant re-mixed these particular cues on April 5, 1984 from his 24-track session masters, specially positioning certain instruments in his stereo spread and editing the cues from multiple takes to create unique demonstration mixes with revised cue titles. Since these special re-mixes differ substantially from those made from the ½” three-track session masters prepared for the complete score we elected to include them. The complete score and all of the source cues appear in dynamic stereo sound as well, but the audio quality of this closing suite is particularly stunning and makes for a spectacular summary of Broughton’s Emmy-award winning music.
This release is limited to 2000 copies.
INTRADA Special Collection - Volume 74
Retail Price: $29.99
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For track listing and sound samples, please visit
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.5869/.f
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