{"id":5197,"date":"2012-07-07T16:46:14","date_gmt":"2012-07-07T20:46:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=5197"},"modified":"2012-07-07T16:46:14","modified_gmt":"2012-07-07T20:46:14","slug":"cd-robe-the-1953","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=5197","title":{"rendered":"CD: Robe, The (1953)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Return to<\/strong>:\u00a0Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Soundtrack \u00a0Reviews<\/a> \/ <\/em>P to R<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>Rating: Excellent<\/p>\n

Label: La-La Land Records<\/a>\/ Released: March 27, 2012<\/p>\n

Tracks & Album Length: \u00a0CD1: 18 tracks \/ (56:08) +\u00a0CD2: 20 tracks \/ (55:23)<\/p>\n

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Special Notes: 12-page colour booklet with liner notes by film historian Julie Kirgo \/ Limited to 2,000 copies.<\/p>\n

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Composer: Alfred Newman<\/p>\n

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Review:<\/p>\n

As the commentary in Fox\u2019 The Robe <\/strong>DVD and Blu-ray detail, as much as Alfred Newman wasn\u2019t fond of scoring religious epics, he was bloody good at crafting multi-thematic scores designed to excite and move audiences, and The Robe<\/strong> is one of his best, due to the perfect offering of marches, a stunning love theme, and reams of theme variations that track the wavering relationships of the film\u2019s characters.<\/p>\n

Newman\u2019s love theme is once again another vehicle for the composer’s famous high register stings which BR co-commentator Nick Redman rightly describes as tear-inducing. Whether it\u2019s manipulative or blatantly melodramatic, the combination of sustained high notes and waves of low chords work like an automatic tear-trigger: the delicate intro sets the theme\u2019s main notes, and then come the contrasting elements which slowly, surely extract drippy tears from the most vulnerable saps in the audience. (Prior classic examples include Song of Bernadette<\/a> <\/strong>\u2013 perhaps his best religious score \u2013 and Captain from Castile<\/a><\/strong>, with that magnificent Catana\u2019s theme.)<\/p>\n

Marches were just as natural to Newman \u2013 the Spanish conquistadors\u2019 theme as well as the intro march for How the West Was Won<\/strong> are modern standards \u2013 and like Miklos Rozsa\u2019s Ben-Hur<\/strong> (1959), he worked them into themes for Roman soldiers, gladiators, and chase music when the film\u2019s heroes are close to being overtaken by a garrison of infantry.<\/p>\n

The Robe<\/strong> also contains short themes and variations, and source pieces designed to evoke a Roman world through Hollywood \u2018s filter, and in his first true stereo score, Newman exploits the range of surround sound by miking his orchestra to fill the entire cinema while capturing the nuances of the exotic percussion and woodwinds.<\/p>\n

On LP, The Robe<\/strong> was originally released in a re-recorded version \u2013 in mono and bullshit stereo \u2013 with some sound effects \u2013 whereas the original score first appeared on CD as an hour-long Fox CD in 1995, and later as an expanded 2-disc edition from Varese in 2003, limited to 1500 copies. La-La Land\u2019s 2-disc set adds additional tracks \u2013 mostly orchestra and chorus-only tracks, plus a few deemed too damaged by prior labels \u2013 and the new mastering features a solid representation of Newman\u2019s score. Some cues still lack some of the upper dynamic range of layer Fox scores, but the stereo image \u2013 augmented by a much higher bit rate and modern mastering gear – lets one admire the early effects Newman applied, including subtle shimmering effects, and sustaining low chords to accent gloomy, morally grey moments in the drama.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Carriage of the Cross\u201d is a major highlight, with three sections \u2013 percussion, brass, and strings \u2013 playing their own distinct, drifting parts before full amalgamation for a main theme replay, and Newman\u2019s chorals, written with uncredited Ken Darby, are superior than the more declarative \u201cHallelujah\u201d that ends the film with a theme jarringly contemporary than Newman & Darby\u2019s original chorals.<\/p>\n

Within the film, the vocal stab for Judas are a bit rich, but on CD they seem to lack the bathos and heightened Hollywood style radiating from the film\u2019s heavy-handed imagery (Christ-ghost nightmare, experienced by a morally sick Gallio en route back to Rome).<\/p>\n

Also effective is the brief percussion clusters that make up the horse chase in \u201cThe Chase,\u201d whereas \u201cDemetrius\u2019 Rescue\u201d still sounds like a last-minute edit between Robe<\/strong> thematic material and leftover cue sheets from Captain from Castile<\/strong>; it\u2019s the lone cue that just doesn\u2019t belong in the film because its rambunctious, swashbuckling style is all wrong. That cue is the lone flaw in an otherwise perfect score, filled with grand gestures as well as simple, intimate elegance, such as the gentle, sweet \u201cThe Market Place\u201d which manages to capture Gallio\u2019s quiet contempt for the nascent Christians as he overpays for banal goods; and the conflicting moral stances of Gallio, the suddenly enriched townspeople, and their sudden shame when Justus makes them return the extra coins.<\/p>\n

LLL\u2019s CD comes with a lengthy essay by Julie Kirgo, perhaps writing the booklet notes that should\u2019ve been written for Fox\u2019 BR but was skipped at the last minute of production. Both the Fox BR and LLL\u2019s CD set compliment each other even though the BR includes an isolated score track. They are two distinct listening experiences: the video allows one to experience the film with the score\u2019s full nuances at play, whereas the CD gives one the soundtrack to underscore the emotional peaks experienced by the film fan \u2013 the original intention of the early Fox LP.<\/p>\n

Ironically, most of the Fox \u2018scope scores are getting their due on CD today because, as detailed in The Robe<\/strong> commentary, studio bigwig Darryl F. Zanuck felt by giving people a soundtrack album, they might not go again to see the film, dropping more cash. It\u2019s a narrow little blunder, because it means most of the studio\u2019s greatest scores have taken at least 20-30 years to appear as albums, either original (as was the case of The Robe<\/strong>‘s sequel, Demetrius and the Gladiators<\/a><\/strong> [M<\/a>]) or re-recorded<\/p>\n

Newman and Hugo Friedhofer were the rare exceptions \u2013 their music did in fact make the occasional leap to the commercial LP realm \u2013 but as LLL\u2019s set reveals, when heard in its unexpurgated form, a full CinemaScope score really becomes its own special thing.<\/p>\n

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\u00a9 2012 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

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External References:<\/p>\n

IMDB<\/a> — Blu-ray Review<\/a> — \u00a0Soundtrack Album<\/a> — Composer Filmography<\/a><\/p>\n

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Return to<\/strong>:\u00a0Home <\/a>\/\u00a0Soundtrack Reviews<\/a> <\/em>\/\u00a0P to R<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Return to:\u00a0Home \/\u00a0Soundtrack \u00a0Reviews \/ P to R . Rating: Excellent Label: La-La Land Records\/ Released: March 27, 2012 Tracks & Album Length: \u00a0CD1: 18 tracks \/ (56:08) +\u00a0CD2: 20 tracks \/ (55:23) . Special Notes: 12-page colour booklet with liner notes by film historian Julie Kirgo \/ Limited to 2,000 copies. . Composer: Alfred […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[20,1],"tags":[355,367,1404,4212],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-1lP","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5197"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5227,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5197\/revisions\/5227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}