jeudi 6 mars 2008

STAR TREK - SYMPHONIC SUITES Volume 2 - The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra


 

1. The Conscience of the King (08:43)
(Composed by Joseph Mullendore - Arranged by Clyde Allen)
Spaceship Titles / Lenore / Lenore's Kiss / Everything Is Later / Ophelia Mania / Last Cue
2. Spectre of the Gun (15:14)
(Composed by Jerry Fielding - Arranged by Clyde Allen)
Melkot's Warning / Tombstone / Teeth Pulling / My Name / Doc Holliday / Love Scene in Old West / Chekov Gets Killed / Ten Minutes / We're Trapped / Final Curtain
3. The Enemy Within (13:15)
(Composed by Sol Kaplan - Arranged by Clyde Allen)
The Rock Slide / The Tired Captain / Bruised Knuckles / An Imposter / Undecisive / Alter Ego / Another Brandy / Double Dog Death / Help Me / Thank You, Yeoman
4. I, Mudd (08:37)
(Composed by Samuel Matlovsky - Arranged by Clyde Allen & Tony Bremner)
Alice in Wonderland / Mudd's Series / Tired of Happiness / Stella / The Last Straw / Stella 500
Total Duration 45:49
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ChiefDundee a dit…

http://hyperfileshare.com/d/4e4c34de

LINER NOTES

Startling as it seems, prior to this series of Star Trek albums from Label X no one had ever turned music written for individual episodes of a television series into concert suites. This seems odd since composers and music publishers have traditionally sought to gain the additional fora of the symphony hall and band shell for their non-symphonic works by reconceiving them in the form of suites for concert orchestras or bands. We find composers or arrangers deriving suites from operatic scores (e.g. Der Rosenkavalier, Don Giovanni), incidental music for plays (Peer Gynt, L'Arlesienne, Divertissement, Masquerade), music for ballets (Nutcracker, Billy the Kid), for motion pictures (Star Wars, Red Pony, Spellbound), for musicals (West Side Story), and from complete television series for which a single composer scored all episodes (Victory at Sea).

The lack of availability to concert lovers of suites of music from singles episodes of a TV series did not go un-noted by Label X. The current Volumes I and II of music from individual scores for television's Star Trek came into being to remedy that lack. Here for the first time in history are concert suites from single episodes of a TV series.

For this album, arranger Clyde Allen accepted the challenge of creating symphonic suites which could be played from beginning to end without interruption, just as though they originally had been through-composed works. This was no mean feat inasmuch as, even more so than with cues for motion pictures, the lengths of music cues for television tend to be measured in seconds rather than minutes. So to fashion what would appear to be a through-composed symphonic suite meant cleverly choosing and manipulating cues so that they would give the impression of one seamless work. Where necessary, transitional passages were devised.

Other questions arose. Which Star Trek scores should be chosen for this special treatment? How should an "original" Star Trek score be defined for the purpose of deciding which cues for each episode would be viewed as potential components of each suite? you see, identical procedures were not followed in scoring all Star Treks. For some episodes, a composer was commissioned to create a totally original scores. For others, after a library of Star Trek scores had been built up, music was recycled and certain shows were tracked entirely with various cues chosen at large from this library. Scores created in this way would be the "work" of several "composers." For still other episodes, an original scores was commissioned but then not used in its entirety, or it was supplemented with revived cues from the music library. Label X producer John Lasher decided that what he wanted to achieve with this album was to convey the ideas, approach, and musical style of each of four individual composers who did not regularly compose for Star Trek. He and co-producer Clyde Allen therefore elected that, with the exception of the main title theme itself, each suite of music from a particular episode would include only cues which were the work of the composer commissioned to write original music for that episode and were, in fact, original to that episode. On the other hand, an effort was made to include in the suites music which each composer had written for this particular episode but which, for one reason or another, was not used. So even the most avid "trekkie" will be hearing such music for the first time.

The sequence of the music in each suite mirrors the narrative continuity of the associated episode. This is true even of the suite from Mullendore's score for "Conscience of the King." Though this suite includes only music which accompanies scenes in which the character of Lenore appears, it still presents music in the order heard in the program. An interesting omission is the "source" music which an unseen dance band plays at the cocktail party where Kirk and Lenore first "hit it off." This cue was obviously someone idea of a little joke because the music the band is playing in the background is the Star Trek main title theme! It is somewhat disguised, of course, in a slightly "jazzed up" party mood version, but it is the theme nonetheless. This is probably the only instance where Star Trek characters actually hear the Star Trek theme. No one takes and particular notice, however. No doubt this is because the party band was an afterthought tracked in later. Unhappily, no score for this jocularity could be found: neither was it on the list of musical cues for this episode. Pity. Had it been available and by Mullendore, we would have wanted to use it. Other source music for this episode for which no score was available was the song which Lt. Uhura sings. We would not have used it anyway because it did not fit into the concept of a Lenore suite. But it was odd that the two source music cues for this episode were not on files. Perhaps they were improvised. A fit subject for an investigator into trivia.

Joseph Mullendore ("Conscience of the King") is a veteran of over 500 television programs, among them Mannix, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Walt Disney Presents, and Wanted—Dead or Alive. An alumnus of the Philadelphia Conservatory, he studied also with Arnold Schoenberg, Ernst Toch, and Mario Castelnuova-Tedesco.

"Conscience of the King," an episode directed by the famed German film-maker Gerd Ostwald, was lushly and principally scored for strings by Mullendore and boats among its jewels an original love theme which surprises many who believe Hollywood composers never "waste" really good themes on television. But not all composers approach television cynically, nor was Star Trek ever just another TV show. It is too bad that the combination of Joseph Mullendore and Star Trek happened only once.

The late Jerry Fielding, whose score for "Spectre of the Gun" is one of only two he did for Star Trek was a much-respected composer for motion pictures and television. He is perhaps best known to film music buffs for his work on Advise and Consent. For television, he was a regular contributor to Hogan's Heroes. An alumnus of Carnegie Tech, he was also the composer of a number of instrumental concert works. His music for "Spectre of the Gun" atmospherically, and with skilled economy, contributes mightily to the evocation of the celluloid West of Hollywood movies and television which this episode of Star Trek parodies. Fiedling is often rather ironic in his references and is at his most tongue-in-cheek when lampooning the "typical" score of a TV or Hollywood westerm, as for instance with his perversion of those countless "saloon scene" piano renditions of "Buffalo Girls." (One is obliged to acknowledge, however, that owing to a "technical difficulty" which befremlined the recording session, that "tack" piano solo as it occurs on this album is somewhat odder than Fielding intended. The piano failed to sound one of the notes required, which accounts for an additional unintentional droll angularity).

The amusement engendered by "I, Mudd" is owed in no small way to the gleeful musical cacklings of Samuel Matlovsky's whimsical score. Born in the Canal Zone, Matlovsky was a student at the Paris Conservatory. He has worked in nearly every theatrical medium, including Broadway musicals and plays, opera, ballet, motion pictures and television. Early in his career he was associated with the music of Kurt Weill, first as music director for the New York runs of Threepenny Opera, Johnny Johnson, and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, then reprising for phonograph records his association with the music of Kurt Weill. Subsequently he conducted for the Howard Keel run of Carousel and presided in the pit for part of the original production on Broadway of Bells are Ringing with Judy Holliday. He was the conductor for the historic debut of Leontyne Price in the Broadway run of Porgy and Bess, which also featured William Warfield and Cab Calloway, and served similary for the Jerome Robbins production of Mother Courage starring Anne Bancroft. Matlovsky has also been represented on Boradway as a composer, having created incidental music for the plays A Month in the Country, starring Michael Redgrave, and Metropolis, directed by Tyrone Guthrie. Further original composition for live theater include dance scores for Sophie Maslow's company, performed when she was presented at Lincoln Center.

Matlovsky's work as a film composer includes the scores for Games, which starred James Caan and Simone Signoret, Birds Do It, Gentle Giant, and Wings of Fire, which starred Suzanne Pleshette. A musical aquatic period occurred during which Matlovsky provided the underscoring for Namu, the Killer Whale as well as for a couple of water-based series for television. One of these gave America a new folk here: Flipper.

In recalling how he came to create his only score for Star Trek, Matlovsky states that music executive Wilbur Hatch simply called him out of the blue, saying that he had heard his work and wanted to entrust the music for a particular episode to him. The result was the score for "I, Mudd."

Samuel Matlovsky currently works out of Canada and has most recently been represented on television by his scoring for the HBO miniseries, Phillip Marlowe.

We are pleased that we have been able to include on the same recording a Star Trek score by Matlovsky and one by a friend of his of many years: Sol Kaplan.

A native of Philadelphia and an alumnus of the Curtis Institute, Kaplan initially seemed destined for a career as a concert pianist. He made his Town Hall debut in 1939 and subsequently, in both 1940 and 1941, performed in Carnegi Hall. But in this latter year, he also essayed his first film score. It was for Universal's notable live-action short, The Telltale Heart, directed by Jules Dassin. Further contributions to the cinema followed and include: Tales of Manhattan, Lies My Father Told Me, Halls of Montezuma, Rawhide, Return of the Texan, Titanic, The Victors, The Guns of August, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and Niagra, the film which made Marilyn Monroe a "movie star." During the time in which he found himself one of the victims of the Hollywood blacklisting of the fities, Kaplan composed the score for Salt of the Earth.

The "Enemy Within," one of two Star Trek episodes scored by Sol Kaplan, has one aspect in particular which should be of special interest to trekkies. As a device not only for unifying his score but also for bringing additional continuity to the drama, Kaplan inventively utilized the well-known motif of the series main title as a leit-motif for the entire episode, permitting its intervals and rhythms to provide a musical analogue to the alternative Kirks and their battle for supremacy. While such usage of the main title music was atypical of Star Trek composers, nearly all of them integrated the title theme into their scores in some way, usually as a fanfare at the beginning and end, and as a "stinger" bridging to and/or from (more often from) the commercial breaks. (Usually the musical bridge from a break accompanied a stock shot of the Enterprise with a voice-over :stardate" update). Over the years music-minded viewers of Star Trek have doubtless marveled over the many ways in wich the various composers for the series have orchestrated, arranged, harmonized, and otherwise invoked its signature theme to sign, each in his own way: Star Trek
— Clyde Allen

Honored General a dit…

Merci, Monsieur Chef Dundee!

ChiefDundee a dit…

The pleasure is mine, Mon Général.

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