Conductor Jerry Junkin is celebrating his 25th season with Dallas Winds, one of America’s most energized and revered ensembles. Add in one of the world’s greatest trumpeters, a superb engineering team, and the goose bumps that come with John Williams’s music, and you’ve got one highly charged new CD – and it’s the latest WCRB CD of the Week!
Dallas Winds is America’s leading civilian wind band, and they’ve been polishing their precision and sound over the last three decades. Their new recording is called John Williams at the Movies, and it opens with the Olympic Fanfare and Theme that Williams wrote for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. It’s become one of the most well known Olympic themes ever written, and it was used to great effect in the 2014 film Pawn Sacrifice, about chess champion Bobby Fischer. It has an extra edge and brightness in its wind band arrangement.
Conductor Jerry Junkin includes the iconic March from the 1978 film Superman, a theme that has come to define the superhero’s very character. Excerpts from Close Encounters of the Third Kind are lots of fun to hear (many of us still remember the original soundtrack released on vinyl, 8-track tape and cassette!). Also included: the Imperial March from The Empire Strikes Back; music from The Force Awakens and E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial; the theme from J.F.K. and the March from 1941; and the 2004 setting of “The Star-Spangled Banner” that Williams wrote for the Rose Bowl game in California. It’s nice to have The Cowboys Overture, too, a 1972 score written for a John Wayne film that caught Stephen Spielberg’s ear and prompted a legendary partnership.
Reference Recordings has done this CD in Super Audio Surround Sound, designed for total immersion, and one of the sonic and musical highlights is the golden sound of trumpeter Christopher Martin, Principal Trumpet of the New York Philharmonic. Listen to With Malice Toward None from the film Lincoln (track 5) and you’ll hear why he’s known as one of the world’s finest.
An exciting recording with incredible sound, worth a listen at full volume!
Listen to a sampler for the album:
For more information and to purchase this recording, visit ArkivMusic.