Romeo & Juliet, like a version style

Prokofiev, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Gounod, Bernstein, and who? Nino Rota? The Godfather guy? 29 years of Fellini films? Ok, i'll give it a whirl. They tell me "What is Youth" is pretty earwormy. Can't be any worse than Cleopatra, 'cause that was yesterday and like yesterday it's gone (i barely remember THAT i listened to it). Here we go....

Conducted? He conducted that intro? Are you sure? Nice trumpets and fighting, though. Yeah, yeah, iambic pentameter. Shameless self promotion, i really do have a choir piece where i take a couple lines from the start and a couple lines from the end and make a coherent question and answer. If you have a choir and an email address i'll send the score to you, really i will.

Actually, his music is quite good. It's a nice modern approach to period writing; a kind of romanticized take on 16th/17th century secular music. I can taste a "minstrel" flavor in spite of my pirate's rum and fruit juice. The voice acting is pretty generic. I once had a friendly argument with a professor about Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, where i said the silliness of the guns and gaudy colors against the original text was an important addition to give the characters their precise teenage mentalities in the late 20th century, talking like that in an ironic display of juvenality. He didn't totally buy it, but i stand by it.

There's a whole lot less music on this album than anyone might expect. Lotta reverb, though. As you might suspect, i picture them descending the staircase in Young Frankenstein, rather than visiting Friar Tuck, i mean Lawrence. I do like the incidental music for the mutually assured destruction of Mercutio and Tybalt. I like it a lot. Brass vs. Strings. Hit the road jack, and don't you come back no more.

She pronounces pomegranate wrong, in case you were wondering. "Pommygranite," ew.

No really, the reverb on their dialogue is a little overboard in my opinion. The movie sets might make that more agreeable, but on record it's honestly pretty annoying.

The music is quite good, if somewhat sappy and a little too Greensleeves-y for my taste. Plus there's just not enough of it to warrant an actual soundtrack. It just comes off as a scattershot audio book to me. On the other hand, I'll probably remember what it sounded like two days from now, so that's at least better than yesterday's soundtrack. I don't feel punish-ed, but i wouldn't tell you to rush out and find it, either. A good solid i listened to it without getting mad.

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