Customer Reviews

El Cid / Ben Hur / King Of Kings: Suites From The Epic Films For Orchestra, Chorus And Organ

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This music is given turgid performances below professional standards. You cannot hear the words of the out of tune choruses. Just terrible.

The recording engineering is among the worst also...very muddy recording.

Please...someone find the DG Rosza tributes and release them at once!

Miklos Rozsa had a long career in scoring film music. In this CD, there are samplings from three of his most well known scores. Ben-Hur won him a deserved Academy Award, one of twelve the film won. El Cid is a monumental score as is King of Kings. Rozsa had a minor fault that many of his themes sounded the same and the miltary marches in one film sounds the same from film to film.But this is a minor complaint. He writes such beautiful main themes that stay with you for days. He can write rousing battle and march music, as evidenced on some of the cuts on this CD. Yet this CD is just a small part of Rozsa's work. I have the complete Ben-Hur score and it is a masterpiece. I recommend trying to get all these scores in their entire glory. El Cid is a glorious score, with passionate Spanish themes of love and patriotism and nobility. Rozsa weaves Yiddish folk themes into his King of Kings score, most of theme beautiful, but none more beautiful than his love theme for Ben-Hur, one of my all time favorites. Rozsa, with a few other composers, wrote for the broad canvas, but he also could write music for intimate moments in historical epics. This CD is fine but if you like film music and Miklos Rozsa, go out and seek his full, rich scores for all three of these epics, and add otheres like The Thief of Bagdad, one of my favorites of his, an early score from this great master film composer.

This CD is truly a mixed bag. It is a re-release of a "Somerset Stereo" 99 cent bin record of the early 60's... I know, I grew up with the vinyl! There is some interesting and sometimes "muscular" playing that has something going for it, and the music is treated purely on its own, thus played often slower than the soundtrack, and sometimes actually differing greatly from the soundtrack. The playing is good, but not great, the chorus is very "wobbly" in their vibrato and tone, and the engineering: above-average 60's analog stereo, but far short of Mercury Living Presence or RCA's Living Stereo. If you're a fan of epic soundtracks, this could be an interesting addition to your collection, but I do question why a $.99 bargain LP from 1962 with less then 45 minutes of music should now cost $17??? With superb alternatives now available from Kunzel on Telarc and others, this is definitely a "curiousity" rather than a must have.

THIS CD IS A MUST FOR THOSE OF US WHO HAVE WATCHED THESE MOVIES WHEN WE WERE YOUNGER AND HAD THE MUSIC PLAYING IN OUR HEADS DAYS AFTER WE WATCHED THEM.AWESOME SCORES!

I was searching for music to King of Kings and stumbled upon this. It is an outstanding CD. I would recommend it highly. Beautiful choral music, organ to make you weep and such majesty to the numbers! GET IT!

As another reviewer correctly pointed out, this is simply an old bargain-bin record that Varese Sarabande cleaned up and repackaged. Varese did this occasionally in their early years when their catalog was still on the thin side. If you are a casual listener who has fond memories of seeing these films and simply wants to relive those experiences, this might be okay for you. If you're a more devoted film music fan, or a Rozsa collector, I can guarantee that you'll be severely disappointed. These are sloppy, sub-par performances with intonation problems everywhere.

I recommend this recording as an alternative: Miklos Rozsa Conducts His Epic Film Scores. It's out of print, but available as an MP3 download. The content is almost the same; Rozsa conducted it himself, so the performances are much better.

All music here great. But the performances are very poor. Recorded sound is fine nonetheless.

El Cid campeador, Don Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, es parte de la historia de España y Miklos Rozsa fue capaz de plasmar en toda su amplitud la grandeza de este heroe nacional. Ben Hur y Rey de Reyes fueron otras dos grandes peliculas de la epoca historia del cine de Holywood. Aciertas si lo compras