CD Reviews

by Jeff Bond

ANNE DUDLEY

Varese Sarabande 302 066 115 2

23 tracks - 54:50

Ever since winning an Oscar for writing a tiny bit of underscore in a movie (The Full Monty) primarily known for its classic disco song soundtrack, composer Anne Dudley has been working double-time to reassure listeners that she was actually worthy of the prize. She wrote a heavy, almost epic-sized score for American History X (the sort of film that normally wouldn't have anything resembling orchestral underscore). She followed that with Pushing Tin, again supplying far more in the way of melodic and rhythmic development than one might expect from a comedy about competing airport traffic controllers.

Now she's taken on The 10th Kingdom, Hallmark's gargantuan miniseries which somehow mixes modern day characters with the personages of classic fairytales. It's an epic canvas on which to paint musically, with the project's wild mix of moods (from terror to fairy tale magic to broad comedy) providing an especially sharp challenge. Dudley's score is as full as one would expect, but she does the subject matter a favor by keeping her writing gauged for low strings, woodwinds and brass, which ground what otherwise might have been an embarrassingly flighty, lightweight effort. There's also some eerie, mythical-sounding choral writing. The result has some of the quality of both John Barry's and Howard Shore's more serious-minded scores, with touches of electronic fancy that will put many in mind of Jerry Goldsmith's Legend. There's a touch of light percussion that intrudes from time to time, but most of the music is wistful and melodic as befits the subject matter. While this music isn't as memorable as Trevor Jones' work for earlier Hallmark fantasy epics like Gulliver's Travels and Merlin, it should still appeal to those who can't get enough of the dungeons and dragons genre. I have one question though: why does every big-scale fantasy score have to reference the theme from Tim Burton's Batman? It shows up here in "Nothing Escapes the Huntsman." Elfman's theme was already a nod to Bernard Herrmann's Journey To The Center Of The Earth, and I have to wonder if Herrmann himself was homaging a classical melody.

Although no orchestral credit is given, the music for the series was recorded in England, meaning that the normally sparse Varese Sarabande album length is expanded to almost an hour. That still means that we're probably hearing a mere fraction of what Dudley wrote for the ten-hour miniseries, but it's enough to give an overall sense of the adventure.

LAURENCE ROSENTHAL

Citadel STC 77123

11 tracks - 43:19

The true story of a man named Gurdijeff who searched through the Middle East and Asia in the '20s (meeting with philosophers and leaders in an attempt to find the meaning of life), Meetings With Remarkable Men features an appropriately remarkable score by Laurence Rosenthal, one of the great unsung practitioners of film scoring. Rosenthal conceived much of the score by adapting piano music written by Thomas de Hartmann, who as a young man was a student of Gurdijeff's as and who allowed himself to be taught by Gurdijeff despite the fact that de Hartmann was a recognized composer at the time of his introduction to Gurdijeff, a man who had no formal musical training of his own. Gurdijeff apparently saw de Hartmann as a musical conduit through which he could disseminate many of his philosophies, and both men turned to the traditional music of the region in which Gurdijeff studied for their inspiration: music of the Kurds, Georgians, Persians and Armenians, all of which gives this score a gently exotic, Far Eastern sound. Rosenthal weaves de Hartmann's disparate thematic material into a full-blooded orchestral fabric, and the result is something like the quiet and introspective portions of a particularly intelligent biblical epic.

It's not until the seventh track, "The Gobi Desert," that the score opens up with a Lawrence of Arabia-like desert flourish, but even here the overall mood is low-key--though unlike today's scores, in which the term "low key" usually translates into one note sustained for five or 10 minutes, there are plenty of seductive melodies working their way in and out of even the quietest tracks here. "The Expedition Fails" moves into more traditional dramatic writing for brass, rich with crescendos and a distinctive call from a ram's horn-like ethnic instrument . "The Journey" and "The Great Prayer" take on a mystical, hollow feeling with a primitive-sounding choir and more touches of ethnic instrumentation, while "The Contest of the Ashokhs" is a long, semi-source piece of hypnotic Mongolian chanting.

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