The Cincinnati Pops is splendid here in excerpts from three genre-leading fantasy and science-fiction film series. Erich Kunzel, something of a genre-leader himself, directs with commitment and respect for the material. The sound is also splendid, with a caveat: it has to be turned up fairly loud in order to preserve the illusion of a natural sound-field. While the program features one well-chosen track from each of the three Harry Potter scores by John Williams and from the three scores by Howard Shore for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the main course is 10 tracks from the six Williams Star Wars films, the first major release I know of to span the complete epic.
The selection tends toward main-character motives (related to Anakin/Darth Vader, Padme, Luke and Leia, Yoda, The Force, and its Dark Side) and does not include favorite action cues, such as The Asteroid Field, Here They Come!, and Ewok March. The two fight numbers that made the cut are Duel of the Fates (whose choral harmonies are also the signature for Palpatine/Emperor and the Dark Side) and Battle of the Heroes (this pivotal moment of the entire series is also where the Jedi themes shatter against the Emperor’s harmonies).
Telarc makes a bad choice by ending the excerpts there, for the release puts the music in the order the films appeared, not according to the story line. This ends the program with evil triumphant. If you arrange the selections in their proper dramatic order, the suite wimps away at the end to the strains of “Luke and Leia”. Properly, the Star Wars set should have closed with one or the other of the triumphant endings of Return of the Jedi. At 61 minutes the producers could have included more action cues and assembled a decent representation of the 10 hours or so of Williams’ magnificent music, enhancing a disc that must compete with numerous other Star Wars collections. Perhaps Kunzel and the Cincinnati Pops would fare better with a recording devoted to Star Trek music (hint, hint!).
