Original Soundtrack - Way West [Original Soundtrack] (CD)

All Music Guide

Bronislau Kaper's music for The Way West (1967) was just about the last classic western movie score ever written, done in a broad, epic style, without any sense of irony, until John Barry's music for Dances With Wolves appeared, decades later except that Kaper's music comes from an even older tradition, dating to Dimitri Tiomkin's score for Red River from 1948, and, in its use of choral music and folk melodies, to a theatrical tradition decades older than that. The Polishborn Kaper had scored a handful of westerns in the previous decade and, perhaps recognizing that time, mortality, and public taste being what they were, this might well be his last chance to deal with the American west in musical terms, and was also one of the larger cinematic canvases of its kind that anyone was ever likely to see again. As it turned out, the screenplay, coauthored by former blacklistee Ben Maddow, left so many loose ends that one had the feeling that United Artists had sharply reduced the budget dur...ing production, so that what was seen on the screen was a shadow of what was expected. Kaper lived up to his expectations, however if his action themes didn't have the growl or drive of Tiomkin's music in similar circumstances, he made up for it with his expansive main title theme, which works equally well as an instrumental drenched in sonorous strings or as a choral piece (sung by the Serendipity Singers), the Coplandesque scoring of "Water and Billy's Death", "Lige Celebrates", "One To Crystal City", and "We're Crossing First", and the thicktextured, bracing Eastern Europeanstyle "Buffaloes And Indians". Andre Previn, in one of his last appearances as a soundtrack conductor, handled the orchestra beautifully, and even the less densely scored passages, such as "Becky's Theme", had a high hauntcount. The LP is worth finding for those who appreciate epic scores, and one sorely hopes that this score will show up on CD complete someday. In 1990, EMI Records in England issued a CD that contained the key highlights from this score, Dominic Frontiere's Hang 'Em High, and Elmer Bernstein's The Scalphunters. - Bruce Eder, All Music Guide Read more Less