Just visited this thread. Here is one of our favorite soundtracks. Add Pulp Fiction, The Big Chill to this list.
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and another:

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Ennio Morricone - Cinema Paradiso

Wonderful movie, beautiful soundtrack

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So I have added 100+ movie soundtracks to my must listen bucket list, many of them inspired by this very good thread and by Jim/Still-One in the What are you listening to tonight thread (thank you!). I will play them in a chronological order and will share impressions as I go down the list.

I started with two wonderful scores composed by Max Steiner, considered the father of film music. They regretfully do sound like pre-war recordings but the historical interest prevails! Via Qobuz


Max Steiner - The Wizard Of Oz (1939)

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Max Steiner - Gone With The Wind (1939)

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Bernard Herrmann - Citizen Kane (1941)
Joel McNeely / Royal Scottish National Orchestra

After a little search I decided to settle on the Varèse Sarabande re-recording, superb score and rendition, via Qobuz

Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine / AllMusic
Varese's 1999 Citizen Kane presents a re-recording of Bernard Herrman's entire original score for Orson Welles' modernist masterpiece, as performed by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under the direction of Joel McNeely. This recording does not reinterpret the score, it simply offers an excellent straight-ahead rendition of one of the greatest musical works in film history.

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Max Steiner - Casablanca (1942)

No Varèse Sarabande version of this one, so I've been listening to the original soundtrack (skipping some of the dialogues), via Qobuz

Herman Hupfeld's tune As Time Goes By is wonderful... "Play it Sam" (Dooley Wilson) :music:

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Max Steiner hated it...and did a remarkable job of incorporating it into his score.

Jim, thanks for sharing this, I love learning new things :thumbsup:

For other curious minds I'm pasting some additional notes

Mark Richards / Film Music Notes

When Max Steiner was asked to write the score for Casablanca, he was told to use the popular song “As Time Goes By” as a love theme for the two main characters, Rick and Ilsa. But as Mervyn Cooke tells us in his book, A History of Film Music,

Steiner apparently disliked the song and wished to replace it at a rather late stage with one of his own: since this would have involved reshooting several of Ilsa’s scenes, the displeased studio executives prevented his doing so on the pretext that Ingrid Bergman had already changed her hair style for her next film.

If Steiner felt stuck with the song, he certainly didn’t show it. In the film, after Sam plays the song for Ilsa, it becomes an integral part of Steiner’s orchestral score. More than that, Steiner skilfully transforms the song to depict Rick and Ilsa’s changing emotions at various stages in their relationship.

Thinking of ordering this book... any other good literature on the subject?

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Rip of Intrada's two-CD set of Bruce Broughton's expanded score and alternate cues for the 1993 film, produced using the original master tapes.

Broughton explains in the program notes that the film was temp-tracked using his score for 1985's Silverado, and the latter's relatively upbeat (I stress "relatively") scoring made Tombstone sound "silly." As he puts it, Tombstone was the "badder boy," so he infused it with a much darker musical ambience.

For my tastes, it's a helluva good ride executed in exemplary three-dimensional sonics. No sardine-can studio sound here.

^^^ thanks for the tip; just bought one! :)

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CD rip of the Varese Sarabande "deluxe edition" release of Jerry Goldsmith's score for 1997's L.A. Confidential. This release includes the 28 actual scene/sequence cues used in the film in addition to the 11 tracks that constituted the original soundtrack album.

I remember that in his review of the original soundtrack album, The Absolute Sound's Harry Pearson dissed the work as a rehash of Goldsmith's score for 1974's Chinatown, implying that the use of a mood-conveying solo trumpet in certain L.A. Confidential scenes was the composer merely copycatting himself. But, as Tim Grieving points out in the deluxe edition's program notes, the Chinatown trumpeter was directed to communicate "bad sex," while in L.A. Confidential the trumpet conveys loneliness.

To these ears, a listening comparison to Chinatown (also released on Varese Sarabande) validates Grieving's assessment. And the overall thrust of L.A. Confidential's stark, predominantly pulse-pounding score strikes me as a case of HP getting it wrong.

Grieving's notes also state that the electronic instruments used in L.A. Confidential were not recorded separately from the acoustic instrument ensemble--as apparently is the case in many film score recordings--but were included as part of the ensemble in the recording sessions. As a consequence, there's a distinctive integrated feel to the orchestral presentation.

A lot of gut-thumping percussive energy in this release. So if your woofers need a workout...

Picked this one up a while back.

Master and Commander is a fine soundtrack.

Almost Famous. Great movie


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Indeed. And this one is quite good also.

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Reissued limited-edition CD of a 2015 remastered Music Box Records release of Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack for director Brian De Palma's 1976 homage to Alfred Hitchcock, Obsession.

I hear faint echoes of Vertigo, Citizen Kane, and even The Devil and Daniel Webster in a spot or two, but the symphonic-leaning score is palpably more original than derivative Herrmann, who in various places uses organ, harp, and/or human chorus to underscore the plot's tantalizing mystery.

Excellent sonics.

A great bop jazz soundtrack from the 1960 Swedish film "Mental Cruelty" by a group lead by pianist George Grunz.

The movie was released but legal rights to the music was in tied up in court litigation for over 30 years before Grunz won the case and released the album.

If you like the early sixties jazz vibe, this is top tier:

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I posted in the classical section also but I guess it’s appropriate here also

Good friend spent Covid writing an original score to the 1922 silent film Häxan. He released it today synced with the film

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The October AA giveaway selection.

My first exposure to Malcolm Arnold's music occurred, unknowingly, as I watched the British film Breaking the Sound Barrier (the U.S. title) as a 12-year-old in a San Francisco theater. Neither the filmmakers nor--officially, at least--anyone else knew that Chuck Yeager had conquered what The Right Stuff called "the Demon" in a Bell X-1 five years earlier. And the solution the scriptwriter conjured up to deal with the buffeting that threatened loss of control as the featured aircraft (a Vickers-Supermarine Swift incapable of supersonic flight) approached Mach 1 in a shallow dive--pushing the stick forward--would have splattered plane and pilot over acres of terra firma. Nonetheless, the film registered. And so did the score. I've been an Arnold aficionado since.

I've seen all but one of the Arnold-scored films (Hobson's Choice) featured on this now-ripped CD. Richard Hickox (who died at age 50) conducts the London Symphony Orchestra in spirited performances of each one, and the Chandos sonics are wide-open expansive.

Thanks a bunch, Ivan.

Ludwig Göransson 2023 OST Oppenheimer

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listened to 2 soundtracks last night and they are wonderful

last of the mohicans and emerald forest