Recovered from the oblivion in a limited edition of 1500 copies, The Master Of Ballantrae directed by Douglas Hickox in 1984, inaugurates a promising series of recordings in the Prometheus Club collection, continuing the steps that Varèse undertook some years ago. To put music for this remake of the homonymous film which starred Errol Flynn, the producer Larry White requested again the services of Bruce Broughton, composer with whom he had already collaborated in the TV miniseries The Blue And The Gray (1982), for which Broughton would be rewarded with the Emmy. Even though the budget of the Columbia ambitious production was considerable, the fraction intended for the music was when less ridiculous given the verbosity of a history that was demanding the accompaniment of a symphonic score that, logically, had to be performed by a great orchestral battery; Broughton only could work with 36 members (practically a chamber orchestra) of the Sinfonia Of London, orchestra with whom he will maintain a fruitful relationship since then. Without doubts this budgetary restriction caused that Broughton grown before the challenge: to create a vigorous sound of adequate epic dimensions with a small orchestra that included only six metals, whose necessarily protagonistic activity in the score caused that Broughton must check and amend the initial orchestration, increasing the participation of the others sections of the orchestra in order to emphasizing the effect of the horns, trumpets, trombonists and tuba each time they participated in the execution of the score. But this series of lamentable economic and technical facts were not obstacle for Broughton to achieved his objective. Upon listening the rich and colourful The Master Of Ballantrae results difficult to believe, in spite of the bad sound of the disk (I suppose that due the wrong conservation state of the original masters) that participated in its conception a number so small of musicians.Two important themes define the style of the work: the epic principal one, inspired in the Scottish compositions of the XVIII century that customarily comes supported by the sound of the bagpipes, as in the Main Title; it is a theme that identifies the location and the time on which elapses the action, and that in the same way is associated to the character performed by Michael York and to the adventures that he undertakes. The second theme, deliberately romantic, is a simple pastoral melody devoted to the love relationship between the characters of Michael York and Finola Hughes. In Broughton's score the music is so gentile and beautiful (Rowan Tree, Courting Alison), as aggressive and boisterous (the two sections of The Battle At Sea or Adirondacks - that is likely a precedent of the ethnic material developed in True Women (1996) for the Indian warrior Tarantula -), but as a rule it is mastered by the characteristic descriptive sense of the composer, that impacts brilliantly with a successful talkativeness in the dramatic moments of the work (James´ Death is one of the better moments of the score). But without doubt the more notable is the admirable orchestration, that distributes the reduced palette of an effective manner conferring to the work very special nuances, as the participation of the sitar in Closing In or the stupendous recreation of the chamber music of the era in the Colonial Minuet, for flute and strings. D.R.C.
/ PROMETHEUS PCR501 / 49'
