INTRADA Announces:
THE SECRET OF NIMH
Composed and Conducted by JERRY GOLDSMITH
INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 332
The original album composer Jerry Goldsmith prepared for The Secret of NIMH in 1982 featured 12 tracks and ran a generous 48 minutes, covering almost all of the score’s major sequences. When Intrada set out to do an expanded and remastered edition, the complete recording sessions proved to be allusive. Missing elements are not uncommon in this business of soundtrack archaeology, but this one was a painful near miss. A deep search uncovered the first-generation, DBX-encoded 1982 album master assembled by Goldsmith and engineer Len Engel, as well as three rolls of 1″ 8-channel and one of three ½″ 3-channel tapes. While these didn’t reveal every sequence of Goldsmith’s magnificent score, they did contain one missing cue -- “At Your Service.” If only one cue of the unreleased material was to surface, this is the one to have. It accompanies the sequence when Mrs. Brisby first journeys into the lair of the intelligent rats. Additionally the elements revealed a complete “demo” version of the end-credit song performed by Sally Stevens and the orchestra. The latter is identical to the film recording with the exception of the temporary orchestra mix and levels, which largely yielded to the vocal for later balancing purposes.
Goldsmith took the scoring assignment under the condition that he could score it like a live-action film. “As I told the producers, if they wanted a Disney-like, synchronize-every-cut type of score I couldn’t do it. I wanted to score it as a live-action film, and they agreed.” The score features as many as eight different themes for the film’s major characters and situations. As the composer described it: “They go from pure romanticism to impressionism, everything. It’s sort of an animated Peter and the Wolf, but it all hangs together cohesively. It’s a much more conservative score than, say, Omen or Outland or Alien or even Poltergeist, but it’s still diversely styled, musically, and it all seems to tie together very well.”
In the film, two stories run in parallel. Mrs. Brisby is a widow, and one of her four children, Timothy, is sick with pneumonia. She is desperate to move her home away from the farmer’s fields, where it will soon be destroyed by plowing, but her family can’t move while her son is ill. The second story involves a group of rodents—rats and mice—being held at a facility run by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). After experimental drug treatments alter the rodents’ DNA and render them intelligent they escape—with the help of Mrs. Brisby’s husband—and form a colony underneath the farmer’s lawn. Because Mr. Brisby is killed while drugging the farmer’s cat, Dragon, he is a revered figure to the rats, who eventually help Mrs. Brisby and her family move their home.
INTRADA Special Collection Vol. 332
Retail Price: $19.99
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For track listing and sound samples, please visit:
http://store.intrada.com/s.nl/it.A/id.9739/.f
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