Reply To: FSM # 25: Favourite film scores of entire film history?
Still here, Thor :). As if I wouldn’t be!
DDS’s first film score was “New Babylon” in 1929, so “October” (subtitled “Ten Days That Shook the World”) was retrofitted at some stage with excerpts from his symphonic output. Not sure I’ve ever seen it all the way through, but I’ve just sampled it, and the 12th symphony is certainly in there. Of all his symphonies, this is the one that gets the most opprobrium, usually for sounding like film music…
He did write a 12-minute symphonic poem in 1967, which timewise falls between his 13th and 14th symphonies, the most troublesome and dangerous works of his later career. I can’t recall immediately, but I suspect this might have been one of those works written to keep the apparatchiks off his back while he privately went about his more dissident compositions.
If I get around to making a list of favourite scores per year, 1964 would be Shostakovich’s year, for Hamlet, even above other fantastic scores for Fistful of Dollars, Pink Panther, Goldfinger and others.