Been a while, so I'll update:
"The Legend of Zorro" is a great 5.1 recording, but it's interesting to hear what is emphasized in each channel since that actually changes from cue to cue.
Guitars may be in the center channel only, or they may be in the front stereo. Shakuhachi blasts are always (rightfully) dead center, and the rears offer a great reverb of the trumpets.
At the same time the stereo mix is so good that I can't say I have a preference for either recording.
"A Beautiful Mind" is a whole other animal.
The original CD is a piece of garbage compared to the 5.1 for one simple reason: The original stereo CD is an incomplete performance.
When the film and score came out much was made of Horner's use of several pianos playing in an interlocking pattern, something you simply cannot hear on the stereo CD, because of the downmixing:
For the cues "A Kaleidoscope of Mathematics", "Playing a Game of GO!", "Creating Governing Dynamics", "Cracking The Russian Codes" and the "Closing Credits", that interlocking piano motif was very creatively mixed by restricting the pianos to the center channel, and left / right rear channels. There's a little bit of them in the front stereo but not nearly enough to be significant. Therefore when the stereo CD was created it simply used the front / center / right channels only, and discarded the rears so the majority of the piano performances are simply missing altogether. Another interesting aspect of the mix is that unlike most film scores with a solo vocalist, Charlotte Church's performance is completely absent from the center channel except for during the end credit song "All Love Can Be". Instead her vocals are in the front stereo, and very gently reverberate in the rear channels. If you listen to the stereo mix, having piano represented solely by the center channel for those cues just leaves it drowned out by the stereo left/right orchestral performance, specifically the strings. For all the non-interlocking motif sections, the piano is mixed more traditionally and not in the rears much at all. "Creating Governing Dynamics" is a good example of this.
I've actually made my own downmixed recording by recording the individual channels myself as I did with "Titanic", as well as making a "center mix" and a "surround mix" as I've always been fascinated by what you both hear and don't hear in each channel of a 5.1 mix.
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