This absolutely fabulous score (one of the greatest of all time, IMO) for Olivier's brilliant "Hamlet" has eluded me for years and I've just located this "scenario" on U-Tube. I don't like the treatment but I'm so desperate to hear this devastating music that I'll put up with it. The absolute best sections are the overture and the final march, starting at 37'37". It builds to a monumental climax and sends shivers down my spine. Also the items, "Entry of the Court" and "Threnody" are very good. That music and the Wellesian direction of Olivier made this film thrilling and compelling viewing. Once-in-a-lifetime Shakespeare, IMO: will I ever forget that camera gliding through the castle as if Hitchcock or Orson Welles was directing!!
A good performance from Sir Nev Mariner and the Acad of St. Martin in the Fields, but the use of John Gielgud, even given his old credentials in the '30s performances, was a bit odd. His voice was too clearly aged for this part.
The scenario was reperformed on a Naxos CD with the RTE Concert Orchestra in Dublin.
Well, name value, and that Gielgud was considered to be the preeminent Hamlet of his generation, and one of the greatest English actors in the role in the last hundred years.
Fine if it doesn't work for you, but I'm delighted to listen to Gielgud's Shakespeare at any age.
I'd love to either hear the scenarios without narration, or better yet recordings of the actual scorea (scores supposedly exist in some fashion for all three Olivier films, though Henry V is "party lost")
I would really adore to have the original score, but I guess that's not possible, though Marriner was using the original orchestration for this "scenario". Some of the sections of the score are faux "elizabethan' music which was fashionable at the time and I can go without this, but the opening theme and the closing music are amongst the very best ever composed for film IMHO. Even now listening to it my eyes moisten as I think of that misty, brooding and fateful closing sequence accompanied by THE MOST stunning score.
What really amazed me when I saw the film the first time (aged 16 with giggling school girls) was the music - the rest of it I didn't appreciate. Later, when I saw it again I realized Olivier had created something of great beauty and with formidable direction. Using the "Citizen Kane" model of photography, I really don't know where an essentially stage actor found 'the chops' to make a film like this since his other films from Shakespearean plays are essentially filmed stage plays. Not so "Hamlet" - a masterpiece of a thing. He obviously had "help", but what form this took I do not know.
Excellent music from a wonderful composer. Shakespeare sure did inspire some magnificent film music and, beyond this and the "usual suspects", I need to call attention to John Scott's ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA and Michael J. Lewis' JULIUS CAESAR. Utterly magnificent scores:
A good release of many of the old Mathieson/Walton suites plus some Olivier from the old narrated albums (but 'Hamlet' isn't included ... just music) is this:
Not currently. But I wouldn't let the dialogue put me off. On the Chandos HAMLET recording, the Gielgud dialogue consists of two stand-alone tracks running 6 minutes. So that leaves 33 minutes (12 tracks) of pure music for HAMLET. In addition, the CD contains 5 tracks (12 minutes) of Walton's music for Olivier's AS YOU LIKE IT (1936). There is no dialogue for AS YOU LIKE IT, although one track includes a soprano voice singing the lyrics to a song.
The Naxos recording seems to combine the Michael Sheen dialogue tracks with adjacent musical tracks, which makes it more difficult to exclude them without losing more of the music.
