Miklos Rózsa once said how difficult was for him to compose the score for the film King of Kings (1961), particularly the scene of The Calvary of Christ, as he has been already composed a music for a very similar scene in Ben-Hur (1959). John Williams doesn´t seem to care about this, and is enough to look back on his filmography to see he has composed the Star Wars Trilogy (1977, 1910 and 1983), the Indiana Jones Trilogy (1981, 1984 and 1989), Jaws (1975) and Jaws 2 (1978), and now again another second part of his first Jurassic Park (1993), with The Lost World. It´s unavoidable listening this last one without comparing it to its predecessor, so then we see the main different: less melodic music; in fact, the Main Theme of Jurassic Park just appears in the End Credits, and a few notes in other tracks. Those who expect something like Hook (1991), E.T. (1982), or even Jurassic Park itself, they´ll better forget about it, and avoid surprises. This soundtrack in much more incidental than any of these, and it requires more than once listening in order to fully appreciate it; don't get me wrong, it´s not a boring score at all, quite the contrary is a carefully worked soundtrack, and we see that Williams seems to be back to his atonal sounds used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or The Fury (1978). The more spectacular parts of the score belong to the percussion, in tracks such as Rescuing Sarah or The Raptors Appear, where Williams uses wonderfully the bongos and mix them with the trumpets, reaching the most vibrating passages in The Hunt with almost frenetic rhythms. Another main part of the soundtrack is the one that describes the ending of the film, A Visitor in San Diego, of seven minutes long and a pretty exciting final (just like his other endings), that makes us breathless. As a curious note, the usual CD jewel box is not used in this edition, but a cardboard folder with the dinosaurs in 3D. And that makes us thinking about a marketing campaign focuses on children (as it happened before with Jurassic Park) being a horror film; but marketing is marketing. A.M.

/ MCA MCAD11628 / 69'