Walking with Dinosaurs

You can almost always rely on the BBC to produce documentaries exceedingly well and so when I noticed that they were going to a documentarty recreating the time of the dinosaurs, I was an unseemly jibbering wreck. I was a minor dinosaur junkie as a child and often just watch the bits in Jurassic Park with the dinosaurs in becuase they are simply so incredible. It has to be said that the BBC has lived up to its promise to let the audience walk with dinosaurs and you couldn't have a programme about such portentous subject matter without a suitably stirring score. Whenever I think of music to go with dinosaurs I'll either think of Jurassic Park or The Lost World (although the former is much higher in the awe and wonder stakes), but also think of the sequence set to Stravinski's Rite of Spring in the Disney epic Fantastia. Fortunately, Benjamin Bartlett and the producers of the show knew exactly what kind of thing the audiences would expect and so more or less deliver the goods as promised. I feared that a soundtrack album might be a little disjointed as there were no extended sequences for which to write extended musical sequences. However, by picking the choicest cues from each of the six episodes, the album is remarkably coherent and manages to create a different atmosphere for each dinosaur or landscape but without straying too far from the overall musical scheme. The grand and rumbling opening title with narration by Kenneth Branagh is perhaps one of the less interesting items on the disc simply becuase there isn't an especially great theme - at least it's not the same as the one that appeared in all the trailers. That particular piece appears in Time of the Titans and is the truly musical high point and is sure to send shivers down the spine simply becuase it is so magnificent.
The intervening cues are made up of the occasional action cue such as Torosaurus Lock Horns - one of those dinosaur battles that always looked like wrestling in films from the 30's, but here is much more realistic. The couple of cues dealing with flying dinosaurs are as a dramatic as would be expected. There are somewhat more lightweight cues, such as the bouncing music for Escape of the Podlets. Cruel Sea on the other hand uses sampled sounds to create an extremely eerie atmosphere although this isn't perhaps as interesting as it should be - although the opening and closing sections are splendid. The music for the Tyrannosaurus wasn't quite as portentously vicous as I would have expected for such an incredible fighting and eating machine. There are a few sections which do recall the best of Herrmann with muted, snarling brass as well as the occasional repeating string figure. This would have made ideal subject matter for Herrmann who would have imbued the entire thing with great drama, but I think Bartlett struck the right balance between drama and not swamping the commentry or documentary style.

While I suspect that the album will have more limited appeal to those in America who haven't seen the programme (but do watch it should cross the pond, it's amazing). Then again, there are so many scores composed for excellent 'foreign' films - ie those not made in America or the UK - that never get heard, that perhaps taking the plunge for this particular effort wouldn't be such a bad idea. The liner notes give a brief coverage of the music in how it relates to the programme as well as a resume on the Bartlett's career. The performance and sound are all excellent - we are lucky in the UK that we have such institutions as the BBC Concert Orchestra who perform splendidly, but still allow to decent length releases. Definitely worth picking up if you've seen the programme as it's much more coherent than would be expected and while there are a couple of slow patches, their are plenty of excellent passages to form a marvellous dinosaur tone poem.