Shane: A Tribute to Victor Young

They Say...

Review by Bruce Eder, All Music Guide

Victor Young is one of those Hollywood composers whose star has probably fallen the farthest from the time in which he lived. For two decades, from the mid-'30s until his death in 1956, he was a mainstay of the Paramount Pictures music department, scoring an array of immensely important movies and earning 20 Oscar nominations in as many years, in addition to composing his share of hits, of which the most notable is probably "Stella by Starlight," written for The Uninvited (1944). But since his death, Young's reputation has receded in the face of competition from such longer-lived contemporaries as Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rózsa, and Alfred Newman. Shane: A Tribute to Victor Young is intended in part to redress that situation, presenting some of Young's most exalted music -- for Shane, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Quiet Man, and others -- and his Oscar-winning music for Around the World in Eighty Days, in the hands of a full symphony orchestra. The results are impressive, to say the least -- the 13-minute suite from Shane is worthy of anything that Aaron Copland ever presented during his Americana period, while the music of For Whom the Bell Tolls is expansive in a completely different way, making heavy use of brass and percussion stings in place of the lyricism in the western score. And the score for Samson and Delilah offers a deeply profound underscoring to the subject matter, investing the material with a seriousness that the limited acting ability of some of the protagonists only allowed them to grope for -- the horn and string parts here evoke exoticism and tragedy in equal measure. The Quiet Man, by comparison, is almost boundless in its light-hearted and lyrical nature, and is the kind of material that one finds running through one's head hours later. It's astonishing that more wasn't done to promote the music at the time of the movie's release. There does seem to be a labeling/indexing error in the CD at the point where the "Tribute to Victor Young," arranged by Henry Mancini, is supposed to appear, but this error of one digit is easily compensated for, although it is surprising that it could happen on so finely produced and mastered a CD as this. The sound is glorious, and the annotation is wonderfully thorough.