Once again, I needed something quick for Thursday, and I decided it was time to cover one of my proudest acquisitions. In my encyclopedic collecting of movie soundtracks, I've had some shifts in my interests. I still love John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, whom I all but grew up with, but their music no longer dominates my listening. On the other side, I've gotten to better appreciate some of the less well-known composers. Of these, the one that has loomed larger and larger for me is a composer who should never have been considered anything but first-rank, Basil Poledouris (1945-2006). He was never as famous as Williams or as prolific as James Horner, but he turned out music for some of the most successful sci-fi/ fantasy and action titles of the 1980s and 1990s, including Robocop, Hunt For Red October, and Starship Troopers. But the movies that brought him into the limelight were the Conan franchise, consisting of Conan the Barbarian and its less successful sequel Conan the Destroyer, and I count the latter movie as his greatest work.
For background, my first recollection of the Conan movies is seeing what must have been the end of the second movie on TV. In college, I finally looked up the movies (along with the fiction of Robert E. Howard), and my strongest reaction was that I just couldn't get into Conan the Barbarian. It wasn't bad by any means, but there was more gore and nudity than I cared for, as well as what I found to be surprisingly limited action for its genre length. By comparison, I was very impressed with the sequel. It was "old school" even for the 1980s, short and fast-paced with lots of over-the-top action and fights that still stopped short of gory for its own sake. While it was understandable it did badly when it was released, on the last legs of the 1980s fantasy boom, I have never understood why it still hasn't received a kinder reappraisal from critics and fans.
The one thing that's inarguable is that the music is great. The main them is the perfect heroic score, with refrains carried over from the first movie. Then there is the Crystal Palace sequence, where Conan is stalked by a seemingly invincible sorcerer, all accompanied by a few ploddingly grim notes that continue right up to a stirring counterpoint as our hero discovers the foe's (obvious) weakness. Per the lore, it was scored for a full orchestra, but budget cutbacks scaled back the number of performers. There were further cuts when the soundtrack came out, leaving the total length at just barely over 30 minutes. And that was the last word until the unstoppable City of Prague Philharmonic stepped in. Here's more pics of the album that resulted.
The City of Prague crew began by performing the score with the full complement of their orchestra. They followed that up by performing many more tracks, bringing the full length of the main disc to 61:33. Then they added a bonus disc with alternate tracks and versions, including an "Adventures of Conan" suite apparently arranged for a Universal Studios live show. Unfortunately, the one thing they didn't get was digital distribution in the United States, which made it necessary to buy the album and black-market rates. After a great deal of waiting, I finally got my copy for a price in the $20-30 range. I can't say the odds are good of finding your own, but I have had glimpses of a digital version available in European markets. If you live outside the US, or have the means to work around geographic rights restrictions, you just might be able to download your own copy. Robert E. Howard would be proud!
That's all for now, as always, more to come!
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