The Fury
The deluxe edition

The story goes that after recording his score to Superman, John Williams had some sessions with the London Symphony Orchestra and so recorded this album of music from The Fury. The liner notes make no mention of this, so I have no idea as to whether this is true. What is true is that the sound quality is considerably better than on the original Superman album and assuming the story is true, one would expect the same engineering team to be present for both recordings. Whatever the case, The Fury is another of Williams' less well known scores, that was swamped by being released a year after Star Wars and the same year as Superman.

Brian DePalma's film deals with two individuals who have psychic abilities that enable them to perform telekinesis and make people's heads explode. All sounds quite charming, but it evidently inspired Williams to write a typically marvelous score. I can't be sure, but The Fury might well have been the first film DePalma made after the death of Bernard Herrmann who had collaborated on Obsession and Sisters, but DePalma seems quite adept at working with some of the best composers in the business (also working with Ennio Morricone, Patrick Doyle and Pino Donaggio). DePalma's style of film making could tactfully described as one long Alfred Hitchcock homage and while The Fury isn't directly linked with any one Hitchcock film, he evidently wanted the music to suggest Bernard Herrmann. This Williams does most strongly in the ominous Main Title, a cyclic arpeggio that is an inverted Vertigo - although ironically it sounds like Herrmann than Goldsmith's Vertigo figure from Star Trek: The Motion Picture of a year later.

Once the opening title is dispensed with, Williams' own personality comes much more to the fore with the surprisingly balletic For Gillian. Another of those delightful scherzos that seemingly crop up in every other Williams score, but are always quite wonderful and this is no exception. This takes the form of more a fully realised concert interpretation, in keeping with Williams' ideal of having an album that exists independently of the film. The rest of the album is considerably darker in tone, with creepy interludes punctuated by some more bracing brassy material such as the latter part of Gillian's Escape.

The finale to the film, the Death on the Carousel is presented in two versions, one which builds less obviously and one that starts from a fair ground tune, into a psychotic orchestral frenzy. As they are so different, they exist quite acceptably together within the same score. I've not seen the film, but would be interested to see the sequence with either version in place as they are further apart in style than alternate cues tend to be. The Epilogue was apparently written just for the album and is a strings only arrangement of some of the most notably material from the score and caps off the album nicely. Performance is excellent and the sound quality good; while not perhaps an absolute lost classic, certainly a more than notably entry in the Williams canon that is well worth seeking out.