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Reviews: Max Steiner: The Adventures of Mark Twain - Stromberg

Reviews: 1

Review by Dinko October 27, 2004 (6 of 6 found this review helpful)
Performance:   Sonics:
With all due respect to John Morgan who has done a fantastic job reconstructing this and other old film scores and to William Stromberg who conducts these Golden Age classics better than anyone, this particular entry in their series of classic film scores seriously overstays its welcome.

A 20-30 minute suite from Mark Twain would have been quite enough. The music is cute and pleasant, pastoral and descriptive, but too many of the cues - while always melodic - are little more than underscore. Steiner's score relies excessively on a couple of themes repeated ad nauseum albeit in different settings, with different orchestrations. This is probably what the movie required so Steiner provided it, but that only means that this is not one of Steiner's finest scores. It's by no means bad. It's just one of those film scores which work wonders in the movie, but when the music is separated from the film, it makes a fabulous half-hour suite, and a boring 70-minute album.

Genadiy Papin is a new recording engineer for the Morgan/Stromberg film music series. I can't say that I notice much of a difference relative to what the previous team of Ivanov and Shakhnazarian used to do, at least in stereo. In order to mimic old style Hollywood studio engineering, the sound is relatively close-miked, but not distractingly so. There's ample transparancy and separation in the instruments, and the sound isn't dry. As usual, the Naxos multichannel sound provides hall ambience.

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