Steiner's tendency for overscoring is one thing that really turns me off about him in general. Dmitri Tiomkin *really* had that problem too. I just watched Shadow of a Doubt, one of the most highly regarded Hitchcock films (top 250 on IMDb, and apparently his own personal favorite of his work), and I thought it wasn't a particularly good film OR score, except for a few good things. I was watching it with a couple friends who like Hitchcock in general and they decided to stop watching!
Alfred Newman and Miklos Rozsa only did that very rarely (I'd say parts of The Black Swan and especially Spellbound come to mind at the moment).
Also, I might get crucified for this because I know Steiner and Tiomkin have a lot of fans here (again, I like lots of their work, I just recognize their weaknesses and prefer other composers), but I also think their music has less of an original "voice" compared with the other composers on my list. Now I can always tell a Tiomkin score and almost always recognized a Steiner, too, but in terms of unique, original sounds/ideas...I dunno...it's hard to express what I feel lacking from them. Tiomkin's famous Oscar speech: "For my award, I would very much like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Johann Baptist Strauss, Josef Strauss, Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner, Beethoven, Schubert, Hayden, Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov ..."
Now while that speech makes me appreciate the man more, I do think his style is really largely a mish-mash of a whole lot of romantic composers. I have a couple friends who are really into classical music but look down on film scores, and when I've played them bits of Tiomkin or Steiner, they tend to dismiss the music as "Hollywood pastiche" but they sat up and took notice when I played the Main Title, De Vargas Family Escape, The Shores of Villa Rica, and Conquest from Captain from Castile. They also liked Korngold (and lots of classical snobs seem to nowadays...his star's really been rising this past decade in the concert hall) and especially Herrmann. I think that all three of those composers have a style in which their influences from other composers are not readily apparent.
Yavar
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