The intervening cues are made up
of the occasional action cue such as Torosaurus Lock Horns - one
of those dinosaur battles that always looked like wrestling in
films from the 30's, but here is much more realistic. The couple
of cues dealing with flying dinosaurs are as a dramatic as would
be expected. There are somewhat more lightweight cues, such as
the bouncing music for Escape of the Podlets. Cruel Sea on the
other hand uses sampled sounds to create an extremely eerie
atmosphere although this isn't perhaps as interesting as it
should be - although the opening and closing sections are
splendid. The music for the Tyrannosaurus wasn't quite as
portentously vicous as I would have expected for such an
incredible fighting and eating machine. There are a few sections
which do recall the best of Herrmann with muted, snarling brass
as well as the occasional repeating string figure. This would
have made ideal subject matter for Herrmann who would have imbued
the entire thing with great drama, but I think Bartlett struck
the right balance between drama and not swamping the commentry or
documentary style. While I suspect that the album
will have more limited appeal to those in America who haven't
seen the programme (but do watch it should cross the pond, it's
amazing). Then again, there are so many scores composed for
excellent "foreign" films - ie those not made in
America or the UK - that never get heard, that perhaps taking the
plunge for this particular effort wouldn't be such a bad idea.
The liner notes give a brief coverage of the music in how it
relates to the programme as well as a resume on the Bartlett's
career. The performance and sound are all excellent - we are
lucky in the UK that we have such institutions as the BBC Concert
Orchestra who perform splendidly, but still allow to decent
length releases. Definitely worth picking up if you've seen the
programme as it's much more coherent than would be expected and
while there are a couple of slow patches, their are plenty of
excellent passages to form a marvellous dinosaur tone poem. Rating ~ Total Time ~ 48:57
You can almost always rely on the
BBC to produce documentaries exceedingly well and so when I
noticed that they were going to a documentarty recreating the
time of the dinosaurs, I was an unseemly jibbering wreck. I was a
minor dinosaur junkie as a child and often just watch the bits in
Jurassic Park with the dinosaurs in becuase they
are simply so incredible. It has to be said that the BBC has
lived up to its promise to let the audience walk with dinosaurs
and you couldn't have a programme about such portentous subject
matter without a suitably stirring score. Whenever I think of
music to go with dinosaurs I'll either think of Jurassic
Park or The Lost World (although the
former is much higher in the awe and wonder stakes),
but also think of the sequence set to Stravinski's Rite
of Spring in the Disney epic Fantastia.
Fortunately, Benjamin Bartlett and the producers of the show knew
exactly what kind of thing the audiences would expect and so more
or less deliver the goods as promised. I feared that a soundtrack
album might be a little disjointed as there were no extended
sequences for which to write extended musical sequences. However,
by picking the choicest cues from each of the six episodes, the
album is remarkably coherent and manages to create a different
atmosphere for each dinosaur or landscape but without straying
too far from the overall musical scheme. The grand and rumbling
opening title with narration by Kenneth Branagh is perhaps one of
the less interesting items on the disc simply becuase there isn't
an especially great theme - at least it's not the same as the one
that appeared in all the trailers. That particular piece appears
in Time of the Titans and is the truly musical high point and is
sure to send shivers down the spine simply becuase it is so
magnificent.
