2001: Music from the Films of Stanley Kubrick

Album Review

Now, here's a curiosity. Although there isn't any acknowledgement in the album's credits, Silva Screen Records' 2005 release 2001: Music From the Films of Stanley Kubrick, which typically employs the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra to re-create that music (along with Mark Ayres doing the electronic honors on Beethoven's Ode to Joy from A Clockwork Orange and the themes from Full Metal Jacket and The Shining), is a slightly re-jiggered reissue of the label's 1999 album Dr. Strangelove: Music From the Films of Stanley Kubrick. That album, released in the year of Kubrick's death and of the release of his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, did not contain any music associated with that last opus. This one adds Shostakovich's Waltz From Jazz Suite No. 2, used in the picture, such that it can claim to include excerpts from the music for all of Kubrick's major films. It also adds a version of Alex North's "Love Theme" from Spartacus. But it deletes from the earlier release three tracks that must have been licensed from other sources: the Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird" (used in Full Metal Jacket), Ray Noble's "Midnight, the Stars and You" (used in The Shining), and Vera Lynn's "We'll Meet Again" (used in Dr. Strangelove). The result is a more consistent, if less varied collection, mixing Kubrick's interest in classical music (Richard Strauss, Handel, and Johann Strauss II are also called upon) with the work of screen composers like North and Wendy Carlos. Particularly prominent is Gerald Fried, who scored five of Kubrick's early films and who conducts a suite of six cues drawn from them. The album gives a good sense of Kubrick's musical taste, making it a worthwhile effort, as long as one doesn't already own the earlier album.