Congratulations to Jose Benitez and his team at Quartet Records for a truly outstanding batch of Xmas 2023 releases:
Seance on a Wet Afternoon/Katharine Hepburn (2CD set): A newly recorded double album of rare John Barry scores.
Heidi/Jane Eyre (2CD set): John Williams.
Dad (2CD set): James Horner.
Bloodline (2CD set): Ennio Morricone.
Venom: early symphonic Michael Kamen score.
Society of the Snow: Michael Giacchino.
I’ve written before about Quartet...and I see now that one of those columns was for their Xmas releases in 2021. Where does the time go?
I was lucky to get a sneak preview of the Barry recording, by Fernando Velázquez conducting the Orquesta de Córdoba. I never thought we’d hear these rare Barry scores (most of them for television), and they sound spectacular.
As you guys know, I ran a film music label for a long time. And I sort of conditioned myself that a lot of things just weren’t possible.
Where do you get the rights? Where do you get the tapes?
Venom to me was like, “Forget about it.”
I was looking into expanding Bloodline when Varèse released their straight reissue of the original album and thought, “Well, so much for that.”
But here they are.
And I never would have dreamed of producing a new recording, because back in the 1990s, sorry to say, I just wasn’t a fan of the new recordings that were being made. They sounded rushed and sloppy. It made me think it was probably a budgetary impossibility to spend enough time and money recording something for a specialty market CD than they did for the actual film—so it would be best not to try.
Somehow, those, the new generation of re-recordings have figured out how to do it. Or maybe they just spent way more than they should? The Barry recording is magnificent.
So color me really impressed, and hoping people support these new CDs so that we continue to get more.
Thanks Quartet!
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