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I haven't listened to all the available sound clips of the upcoming Spellbound recording, and I'm in no hurry to do so. I'll buy this release unseen. I mean unheard. If the previous Excalibur recordings are any indication at all, it'll be an outstanding recording. And even if it should fall short of Ivanhoe, Julius Caesar, or Jason And The Argonauts -- all of them exemplary recordings -- it would still be pretty darn good.
I've said this time and time again over the years when the topic concerned re-recordings, and I'm saying this here again: a re-recording of a classic film score has to do the music justice. This cannot be accomplished if the recording tries to emulate a previous recording. Music is a performance art, it's a live and breathing thing, and no two recordings of any piece of orchestral music sound alike, nor would it be desirable if it were so. I have numerous recordings of Beethoven's symphonies, all of them good (I got rid of the bad ones), all of them different. Just like an actor playing Hamlet has to try to do Shakespeare justice and not Olivier or Brannagh, so a recording of Spellbound has to do Rozsa's music justice, not Rozsa's or anybody else's previous recordings of that music. Such an undertaking could only become a mechanical exercise and would still miss the mark, because it would be impossible for a conductor and an orchestra to sound exactly like another orchestra under a different conductor. Even the same conductor with the same orchestra cannot produce an identical sounding recording, especially not years later. Listen to how different some of Bernstein's, Karajan's, or Solti's, or whoever's recordings of the very same piece with the very same orchestra sound when they record(ed) it again years later.
I have full confidence in the people behind this project that I'll buy this recording without having heard a single note (well, I did watch to some of the recording footage), and I fully support such efforts. I'm glad they didn't strive to photocopy the original recording but recorded Rozsa's wonderful score in the best possible way to bring the music to live again. Cheers to it.
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sounds fantastic!!
