Prince Valiant

1954年影片《Prince Valiant》原声。 by Bruce EderFranz Waxman's score for Henry Hathaway's costume-adventure yarn Prince Valiant (based on the long-running comic strip) comes to CD nearly 50 years late, but is every bit as enjoyable as it was when the movie was released in 1954. Soundtrack albums of non-musical films were not routine in the early '50s, and Waxman's score, as alluring as it was musically, somehow got passed over. The music is a marvel of subtle sophistication, successfully melding rousing fanfares and music heralding lavish action and spectacle with material covering the internal existences of the characters, and their more subtle attributes, whether gently comical ("Sir Gawain") or evil ("Sir Brock"), along with passages of stunning lyricism and shimmering orchestral beauty ("Val Escapes"), and a profoundly memorable and enveloping love theme ("Val and Aleta"). What's more, in contrast to many film scores, Waxman on Prince Valiant tended to write in longer musical passages so that there are very few abbreviated cues. With the exception of one short procession theme (which threatens, in the beginning, to parallel Erich Wolfgang Korngold's "Robin Hood" march but develops very differently), much of the music has a chance for development and elaboration that, at times, parallels aspects of a symphonic work. Waxman's conducting is also marvelously expressive and vigorous, taking on an especially finely nuanced character on "The Banquet." The music has been remastered with great care, in stereo (20th Century Fox was doing many of its soundtracks in stereo before the 1950s); some damaged sections of the original recordings have been repaired and edited into a separate eight-minute suite, but, overall, this CD should be a model for the way the DVD should treat the music. The annotation is extremely thorough, as well, and, given the care that went into it, the disc is a bargain at its 20-dollar list.