Richard Rodgers
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For Vol. 3 of its terrific Victory at Sea trilogy of suites from the 13-hour TV documentary score, RCA Victor went for broke in the sound effects department. With its list of recorded weaponry, courtesy of the U.S. Navy, proudly plastered on the fiery impressionistic album jacket, Vol. 3 is one of the noisiest symphonic records ever cut -- deliciously so. Right off the bat, the war comes firing and strafing and booming through your speakers before a single note of music has been sounded. Luckily, arranger/conductor Robert Russell Bennett was able to extract still more gold from this score, coming up with more superb marches, more atmospheric scene painting, more first-rate tunes, and more eloquent perorations amidst all this ruckus. And it worked, not only for the hi-fi buffs of the time, but for music lovers and even avant-garde followers, who might have considered Vol. 3 a new populist form of musique concrète. Some of the best music of the series can be found in this album -- the fast, bracing "Rings Around Rabaul" march, the stirring theme that kicks off "Full Fathom Five," the arch drama of "The Turkey Shoot" -- and Bennett's scoring is audibly more militant, with more liberal use of snare drums and muted brass, than in Vols. 1 and 2. Near the end, though, one gets the feeling that the 67-year-old Bennett was getting just a bit fatigued with this long-running project, for there isn't enough new music to fill an LP. And so, the seven-movement suite concludes with a lengthy, if slightly cut, "Symphonic Scenario" first recorded by Rodgers himself in 1954, a mere rehash of the most famous themes from Vol. 1 with hardly any "new" material. Victory at Sea buffs who bought this music in the 1990s as part of the CD More Victory at Sea were in for a shock. All of the original sound effects had been stripped away, and newly recorded effects were sparingly applied in their place. The results were a revelation, exposing underlying music that had been obscured by all of the guns and torpedoes and whatnot. Not until then was it apparent that the sound effects had been conceived as an integral part of Bennett's score, not a gimmick pasted on by zany sound engineers, for one could hear some gaps in the scoring that the original sound effects were supposed to fill in. So in many ways, it's best to hang on to the original LP of Vol. 3, with its handsome foldout jacket and booklet of essays and photos from World War II. Richard S. Ginell, All Music Guide Releases:
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Richard Rodgers|
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