I consider Michel Legrand to be one of the great geniuses in music (film and otherwise) and perhaps my favorite living composer.
My top ten:
1. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (a movie musical, but for me easily his best work) 2. The Happy Ending (genius scoring - amazing on album and mesmerizing in the film) 3. The Summer of '42 (short, but Heaven) 4. The Go-Between (hopefully the film recording exists) 5. The Young Girls of Rochefort (another movie musical, but the instrumental cue "Concerto" may be my single favorite Legrand piece out of everything he composed) 6. Bay of Angels 7. The Thomas Crown Affair 8. The Picasso Summer 9. Wuthering Heights 10. The Other Side of Midnight
Bubbling under the top ten are all of these, which are all excellent & basically tied for eleventh place: Le gang des otages, Le Mans, Brian's Song, The Hunter, The Mountain Men, Our Time, One is a Lonely Number, Donkey Skin, Castle Keep, Ice Station Zebra, Sweet November, Cleo from 5 to 7, Eva, Vivre sa vie, Band of Outsiders, A Woman is a Woman, and Lola.
I love his music for Yentl, but I prefer the symphonic suite to the songs as heard in the film.
Of his scores of the last fifteen years, of which there have been precious few (less than fifteen, in fact), I like The Blue Bicycle and La rancon de la gloire (his most recent) the best. I wish more filmmakers would hire him.
Going through his filmography there are still quite a lot of his scores I haven't heard - a few of these are out there but a great deal of titles are still unreleased.
I would love to hear his rejected score for Max Rose someday.
Michel Legrand is equally important as a composer and as an arranger, and I don't think you can get a full picture of his contributions unless you include both in the same conversation.
So, here some of my favorites, in no order:
Legrand Jazz Michel Legrand Plays Richard Rogers Eva Lola La Piscine Wuthering Heights Umbrellas of Cherbourg orchestral suite - the arrangement on the Columbia LP The Go-Between themes and variations The Young Girls of Rochefort instrumental album on UA The Thomas Crown Affair Communication '72 (with Stan Getz) Images (with Phil Woods)
Thomas Crown Affair The Umbrellas of Cherbourg Yentl The Happy Ending Cops and Robbers The Other Side Of Midnight Le Mans Pretty Polly Le Piscine Never Say, Never Again
There was a time when a thread on Michel Legrand would have generated more conversation here. I guess those days are gone...
Sadly, Legrand has kind of fallen out of favor. This recent article on RogerEbert.com about "The Other Side of Midnight" dismisses his score as "syrupy" (ugh, also what the "Max Rose" Cannes reviews said about his subsequently rejected score), "overbearing," and "great to play at your next fondue party" - good God you'd think the author was writing about Mantovani.
The author suggests that Miklos Rozsa should've scored it, which is a perfectly reasonable opinion and shows that she knows about film music, but it some pains me to read such trashing of Legrand, whose score for "Midnight" is a sweeping, glorious, epic work that is marvelously orchestrated and performed.
