Customer Reviews

Jurassic Park (Piano Solo Songbook)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has contains some excellent piano pieces. The contents are as follows: "Journey To The Island," "Theme From 'Jurassic Park'," "My Friend, The Brachiosaurus," "Remembering Petticoat Lane," "A Tree For My Bed," and "Welcome To Jurassic Park."

Three pieces use the music from the main theme: "Journey To The Island," "Theme From 'Jurassic Park'," and "Welcome To Jurassic Park." Incidentally, I found these three to be the most rewarding to play on the piano. "Journey To the Island" is my personal favorite and is magical to play.

I give this book four stars because I know it could have been much better. There's only 32 pages here, and of those pages only 25 of those are sheet music. The front of the book has photos from the movie which are superfluous. I have no idea why publishers put movie photos in soundtrack music books. I think people who buy such books are probably familiar enough already with the movie. The extra space could have been used for more music pieces instead. On the "Jurassic Park" soundtrack, 16 tracks are included. This book only has 6 of those in sheet music form, and generally speaking those 6 are the more mellow of the songs. I think it would have been interesting to include some action pieces like "The Raptor Attack."

The pieces are at least intermediate in the level of difficulty, but they are very rewarding to play on the piano (I will give the publisher some kudos for releasing this as a piano solo edition). I highly recommend this book for piano players who like the "Jurassic Park" theme music.

Jurassic Park Piano Solos is faithful to the original movie. Although only a handful of the songs (6 songs in total) have been selected to be in the book, they are probably the only ones you would want to play anyway, as they are the most memorable.

The three stand-out pieces are Journey to the Island, Welcome to Jurassic Park, and, my personal favorite, Theme from Jurassic Park. These arrangements are of moderate difficulty, so they require some practice and patience to play. The end result is worth it, as each piece sounds true to the movie when it all comes together.

There are two reasons why I didn't give it a higher rating. One, I found that this book is intended for hardcore fans of the movie, not necessarily casual pianists. Only enthusiastic fans will have enough incentive to learn and appreciate all of the songs. Two, the end of each song seems truncated, missing a kind of excitement found on the soundtrack. Indeed, the piano can be a bit limiting when compared to an orchestra, but even so, the arrangements seem to conclude in a rather lacking way.

I recommend this collection of songs for those who consider themselves big fans of the movie.