Orchestral Film Adventure Music – Prospero Classical

There is something almost willfully unfashionable about a double album of orchestral film music in 2024, and I mean that as a compliment. The programmers at Prospero Classical have put together something that repays sustained attention — not a grab-bag of greatest hits, but a coherent argument about adventure as a cinematic and musical idea.

Start with what’s missing. No opening crawl from Star Wars. No “Imperial March.” Those omissions are strategic, and they’re right. We’ve heard those pieces played by every pickup orchestra from here to Bratislava, and their absence creates room for the album to breathe, to make its own case.

The case begins well. James Horner’s score for The Mask of Zorro never gets the credit it deserves — Horner at this point in his career (1998) had completely internalized the language of Miklós Rózsa, and he knew it. He’d studied El Cid the way a young novelist studies a master stylist, absorbing the rhetoric of brass-heavy proclamation, the particular Spanish-inflected modal harmony Rózsa used to evoke antiquity and grandeur. Both scores appear here, and the juxtaposition is pointed: Rózsa’s El Cid music, from 1961, stands as one of the last genuinely monumental achievements of the Hollywood Golden Age, and Kevin Griffiths and the City Light Symphony Orchestra play it with a weight and ceremonial gravity that honors its ambitions.

Griffiths, it should be said, is very good at this.

He doesn’t sentimentalize, and he doesn’t hurry. The Lucerne acoustic — warm, present, clean without being antiseptic — suits him. You can hear individual string desks in the inner voices, the woodwinds project without being shoved forward in the mix, and the brass have body without turning into a wall of noise. These things matter enormously in music this dependent on orchestral color and textural layering.

The Erich Wolfgang Korngold selection is worth pausing over. Rather than raiding the obvious swashbuckling set pieces from The Adventures of Robin Hood — the duel music, the processionals — the compilers have chosen the Love Scene, and it’s a reminder that Korngold, before Hollywood claimed him, had written some of the most erotically charged lyric music of the early twentieth century. Die tote Stadt, Das Wunder der Heliane — this was a composer of the European avant-garde’s conservative wing who brought genuine compositional sophistication to a medium that often demanded assembly-line product. The Love Scene from Robin Hood is romantic in a way that connects Strauss to Steiner, and the orchestra plays it with real warmth.

John Williams, inevitably, dominates. “Adventures on Earth” — the suite assembled from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial — is extraordinary music by any measure. Williams had been studying Holst and Walton and Vaughan Williams his entire career, and in E.T. he synthesized all of it into something that manages to be entirely accessible and structurally sophisticated at the same time. That it won the Oscar in 1983 is the least interesting thing about it. What’s interesting is the way Williams builds momentum through orchestral accumulation, the way the harmonic rhythm accelerates toward the final sequence, the way he uses the full string section not as a blanket but as a breathing organism. Griffiths understands this music from the inside.

Less successful — through no fault of the performers — are the three excerpts from Michael Giacchino’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Giacchino is a skilled craftsman, and he faced an impossible brief: write music that sounds like John Williams without being John Williams. The result is competent pastiche, and placing it immediately before Williams’s own music for The Empire Strikes Back is, unintentionally or not, a bit cruel. The Han Solo and Princess Leia theme that closes the album reminds you immediately what Williams can do that nobody else quite can — that particular gift for melody that seems inevitable, that feels like it was always there waiting to be discovered.

Alan Silvestri’s Back to the Future suite is a genuine pleasure and perhaps the disc’s most underestimated item. Silvestri has spent decades in Williams’s shadow, which is unfair. His harmonic language is his own — less tonally stable, more chromatic in its transitions, with a fondness for sudden enharmonic shifts that Williams rarely uses. The suite draws intelligently from all three films, and the orchestra plays the famous main theme with a rhythmic precision that keeps it from becoming mechanical.

The recorded sound is outstanding throughout. Lossless streaming does justice to the dynamic range, and the engineering never feels like it’s polishing the music into unreality.

Two discs, 112 minutes — which is, truth be told, a bit short for the package. That’s a minor complaint. What’s here is chosen well, played well, and recorded well. For music this rich in association and memory, that’s harder to achieve than it sounds.