John Williams receives the most entries, starting with a superbly arranged suite from Temple of Doom that opens with a minute or so from Slalom on Mount Humol, but soon segues into the end credit suite. Naturally, Williams' brass dominated music sounds just fine in this format, even if his ornamentation, usually left to woodwinds or strings, sound a little strange on a rather too high trumpet. Unfortunately, Williams is let down elsewhere by some dodgy arrangements, not so much in the way the orchestration is amended, but in some unusual editing choices. Superman starts and ends with the march, but the central love theme snippet is expanded to a longer extract from its own concert arrangement. However, Star Wars starts with a slow announcement of the main theme, picks up and then sort of fades back the way it started. Most odd, when clearly the original blazing opening fanfare would be a great opportunity to show off. Fortunately, aside from a slightly amended ending, Williams' Jurassic Park concert suite is pretty much as the original and given a fine performance.
Aside from the Bernstein, there are a couple of other movie marches, notably Kenneth Alford's inimitable Colonel Bogey March from Bridge Over the River Kwai (even if there's nothing from Malcolm Arnold's original score) and Eric Coates' equally enjoyable march from The Dam Busters. March of the Charioteers from Ben-Hur works well, but of course the original is brass dominated anyway. The more up to date entries include the Feather Theme from Silvestri's Forrest Gump, a score that has largely no brass at all, but the translation of the piano and strings melody is fairly good, although even the most dainty brass playing doesn't quite have the gentility of piano and shimmering violins. Chicken Run is perhaps the most unlikely entry and is variably effective. The opening, which attempts to translate string trills and runs directly onto trumpets and cornets, feels a bit too much like forcing one instrument's style onto another, but of course the bouncing march passages sound great. Barbarian Horde from Gladiator is also extremely good, the rest of the orchestra, save for the percussion - reproduced acoustically, very well, here - being fairly subordinate in the original orchestration.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about this album is how clean and crisp the playing is. I don't know if there's a different style of performance for band brass compared to orchestral brass or if it's just the recording style, but there's much less bloom on the higher instruments and not a great deal of the round depth in the bass instruments. In the louder tracks it makes for a crisp, if somewhat harsh and uniform sound, although the softness in the quieter moments produces some very welcome changes in timbre. Discs like this are meant to be something of a novelty item, but the performance and interpretations have a clean professionalism, even if there's not exactly a great deal in the way of artistic interpretation. All the interpretation seems to have happened in the translation from orchestra to brass band. However, if you want to hear some variously famous movie themes in an unexpected guise, certainly worth a listen.
Rating ~ 