Elmer Bernstein

Album Review

This CD, running just over an hour, is one of several re-recordings of the late Elmer Bernstein's music done during the digital era. This one has the advantage of having been done by Bernstein himself, and is also a little more wide-ranging than most, encompassing 30 years or more of Bernstein's career, and several styles, genres, and idioms, including his Westerns (The Magnificent Seven), dramas (To Kill a Mockingbird), epics (The Ten Commandments, Hawaii), thrillers (The Great Escape), crime stories (The Grifters), comedies (Ghostbusters), and also his jazz-based scoring (The Man With The Golden Arm). The sound is excellent and is matched by the performance of the Royal Philharmonic Pops Orchestra, and the annotation — mostly by Bernstein — is extremely thorough and informative. There are longer excerpts of almost every score represented here elsewhere, and even complete versions of many of them, but this is the best overview of Bernstein's work that one is likely to ever find on a single CD.