A Maurice Jarre

Maurice Jarre wrote the central musical motif of his score for Doctor Zhivago, "Lara's Theme," in a few minutes in a hotel, amid a frantic five-week rush to score the 197-minute movie. That theme made the Doctor Zhivago soundtrack album one of the biggest selling soundtrack of the 1960s, a considerable feat when one reckons in the competition from A Hard Day's Night, Never on Sunday, A Man and a Woman, Exodus, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The rest of Jarre's score is more in the realm of lushly textured Russian-themed mood music, filled with dark male choruses, folk and folk-like themes, and dense orchestrations, sort of faux-Tchaikovsky. The stereo separation is used to good effect, and the music as a whole forms a kind of romantic/exotic travelogue as much as a dramatic sketch of the movie's action.

In 1977, Sir Lew Grade and acclaimed Italian director Franco Zeffirelli (Romeo And Juliet, the wonderful Mel Gibson Hamlet) were in the midst of finishing their sprawling six-hour miniseries about the life of Christ when they turned to veteran composer Maurice Jarre for the musical chores. While Jarre apparently had his reservations about doing work for television, in this case his fears turned out to be unjustified. With an all-star cast, exotic locations that spanned the globe, and most importantly the type of budget that could afford the kind of epic score Jarre had in mind, many still consider Jesus Of Nazareth to be one of the definitive filmic depictions of the J-man to date. Quite a feat, considering that the Guinness Book Of World Records calls Jesus the single most portrayed character in the history of cinema.

Composer Maurice Jarre's majestic score for David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia is as epic and grand as the 1962 Oscar-winning movie itself. Bombastic and hypnotic, balancing sweeping strings and brass with violent percussion, Jarre (who also conducts) holds back nothing, relying on the film's desert vistas to guide his soaring, Middle Eastern-inspired cues into the listener's head like a cannonball. While the Tony Bremner-conducted re-recording that appeared a few years later is of excellent quality, there is no matching the power and cinematic scope of the original.

One might have expected that Silva Screen Records, here operating through the subsidiary label Silva Classics, would be more interested in Jean Michel Jarre's father Maurice Jarre than in the younger musician. After all, Reynold da Silva's record company specializes in making new recordings of music from film scores, and it's Maurice Jarre who's the famous screen composer, while Jean Michel Jarre is the synthesizer player who stages spectacular concerts and sells records in the millions with his new age music. But that's the point: this is The Symphonic Jean Michel Jarre, an attempt to take his music and play it as though it had been written like his father's. As usual, Silva employs the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, with the Crouch End Festival Chorus along to provide the "ah" sounds as appropriate…