Reply To: What is your favourite soundtrack record label?
That’s now more a philosophical discussion… are preferences inherently self‑centered? Do they carry moral weight?
I don’t really think so, so again, I don’t think “egoistic” is the right word. Sure, a preference is purely “personal“, you can “prefer” anything you want, it’s a personal thing… it may be subjective, it may be unreasonable, it may be all kinds of things… I think some preferences can obviously lead to egoistic or anti-altruistic behavior/actions, but a “preference” in itself seems rather value neutral to me. I can prefer coffee over tea, that’s a personal preference. If I declare all tea illegal and demand that everyone drinks coffee, now that would be something else. But whatever, no need to belabor the point, as I said, I think anyone can prefer anything they want anyway (which is why I’d say La-La Land releases are about as close as possible in the film score world to get anyone whatever they want as seems humanly possible in the real world).
Speaking of THE FURY, I ended up with several copies of that score, including two of the 2CD Varèse Sarabande CDs you have. I also had two La-La Land 2CD sets (basically the same as the Varèse Sarabande set), and two “regular” soundtrack editions. I traded some of these away over the years.
THE FURY is one of those cases where I personally love and need “both” versions, as they are substantially different. John Williams made a great original soundtrack album for THE FURY, the tracks are well selected, excellently performed, and both the performance and the music itself are significantly different from the film tracks. The soundtrack recoding has the wonderful “Epilog”, whereas the film recording contains action music from beginning of the movie and the Fog Scene, music I always wanted to have before I even had my first CD. “Gillian’s Power” is more aggressive on the film tracks and has the theremin, which Williams didn’t use in the re-recording. So THE FURY is one case where I like the original film tracks recording and the soundtrack album recording equally.