Bernard Herrmann’s superbly colourful and imaginative score for Ray Harryhausen’s The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad – the first of this team’s four collaborations, the others being The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960), Mysterious Island (1962) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963) – dates from 1958, a busy year for the composer (other recently completed projects included Vertigo and The Naked and the Dead). As Christopher Husted points out in his helpful booklet-essay, Herrmann successfully quarried thematic material for Sinbad from two compositions he had originally written for CBS Radio in 1934. The first of these was The City of Brass, a setting for narrator and orchestra based on The Arabian Nights, ideas from which appear in “The vase”, “Night magic”, “The return” and “The transformation” (tracks 9, 13, 17 and 30 respectively). The other work went by the name of Egypt: a tone picture, an unfinished orchestral score effectively resuscitated in the exotically sinuous portrait of Baghdad (track 7). Elsewhere, the extensive study of Javanese gamelan music Herrmann had made when preparing his scores for Anna and the King of Siam (1946) and King of the Khyber Rifles (1953) is once again evident in “The egg” (track 24) and “The genie’s home” (track 26), the latter evincing a luminously textured serenity reminiscent of Herrmann’s slightly younger countryman, Lou Harrison.
Under John Debney’s affectionate, vital lead, the RSNO audibly revel in Herrmann’s fantastical, other-worldly soundscapes, be it the bustling clangour of the splendid “Overture” (track 1, complete with those unforgettable, snapping trombones), the awesome menace, mystery and savage fury of “The Cyclops” (track 5), the percussion-only theatricals of “The fight” (track 16), the outrageously raucous “Fight with the Cyclops” (track 21) and the hapless monster’s gloriously over-the-top demise (track 22), the trumpets’ spectacular descant ostinato during “The fight with the Roc” (track 27), or the maniacal “Duel with the skeleton” (track 32) with its grotesquely chuntering battery of xylophone, whip, woodblocks and castanets.
Varese Sarabande’s resplendent 20-bit sonics do full justice to the irresistible physicality of Herrmann’s frequently astounding inspiration, and the good news is that the three remaining Herrmann/Harryhausen projects are already in the pipeline from this same source. A hugely enjoyable issue. '