The Magnificent Seven: Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack [Enhanced CD]

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Music reviews of The Magnificent Seven: Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack [Enhanced CD]

Music Review: Great music - bad sound quality
Rating: 4 Stars

This score is much more than its well-known theme, however. It packs in just about everything one would expect from a score for a Western/Mexican movie written pre-Morricone: Happy trumpet lines, lots of latin percussian, fanfareing horns, and Spanish guitar motifs -- and mixes them up brilliantly.

There's lots of great themes abound, especially the various "riding" themes. Almost all the way through the score is packed with some kind of forward energy (it's said that Bernstein intentionalally wrote music faster than the action on screen to make the movie seem better paced). Beyond the main theme, I especially like the secondary theme, prominant in 'The Journey', and the wonderful trumpet theme featured in cues such as 'Calvera's Return'. And the final ten minutes or so bring them all together masterfully providing a great climax to a great score.

Unfortunatly, if you buy this album, you must take the bad with the good. This is the ONLY release of the original tracks recorded in 1960, however the sound quality is, quite frankly, painful at times. The hiss is very overbearing in some spots and listening to this on headphones is not the most pleasent experience. It's probably not Ryko's fault, as they were quite capable of producing albums with great sound (see Taras Bulba, a 1962 score). It was long thought that the original tapes were lost, so they likely deteriorated. As a result, I would recommend either of the two re-recordings -- one on the Koch lable, and the other very hard-to-find one the BMG lable (the prior is still buyable, but the latter is a slightly better performance).

So overall, buy this great score in some form, but I recommend a different version than this, unless you are the type who MUST have the original performance.

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