In the record market we can find compilations of music for westerns or science fiction, of composers, of actors and actresses, of directors etc... , but so far I don't remember none that approached the gender of catastrophes. Well, here we have it. The label Varése Sarabande, in knowledge of the interest that there is for the soundtrack of The Towering Inferno (1974) by John Williams, and that unaccountably it has not still been published in CD, it has taken advantage of it to throw a compilation on which besides including three themes of the mentioned movie, we find others from different titles of the gender, although in my opinion they could have excluded some, not for its musical quality but for the type to which belong, as Independence Day (1996), and have included others as Airport (1971) or Airport 1975 (1974). The most excellent in the compilation is, without any doubt, the mentioned The Towering Inferno, not only demonstrated by the title of the CD, but for the extension of the three cues included and the fact that one of them is of 11 minutes of lenght -something absolutely atypical in a compilation -; starting that I say that there are not two same recordings, that there is anything that suspasses the original (and more if John Williams is behind it), and that whom writes these lines began to collect soundtracks with this score, I believe that the conductor Joel McNeely has stuck at the maximum to the original, without added touches, and even the tempo in most of the occasions is almost perfect: the first of the themes, Main Title, has an impressive strenght marked by the dinamism of an helicopter over San Francisco; the second, Planting The Charges And Finale, is the most incidental cue in the movie and an authentic gift for the hearing, with very dark passages, and where Williams goes generating a very contained tension that will be accentuated exactly in the moment where the main characters escape from the place where they have placed the explosive, reaching its climax in the moment of its detonation; lastly, An Architect's Dream is the theme corresponding to the final titles that had already appeared with another tempo and instrumentation as the love theme in the movie. They are three pearls of a magnificent score that partly calm its absence in a CD edition.
The rest of the compilation is also very interesting, and it suits to stand out that in its majority it is conducted by Joel McNeely and John Debney, but there are also original cues from Outbreak (1995) or Volcano (1996) conducted by its own authors. Maybe I will stand out Jerry Goldsmith's The Swarm (1978), excellent score also very prospective for the fans in its edition in CD, and the best in a very slack movie. Titanic (1997) closes the disk, and although we are already a little bit tired of Horner's music it is understanding its unavoidable inclusion in the compilation. A.M.M.
