Delerue New 6 CD Set

Can anyone advise the number of tracks for each of the titles in this new, huge set? As for sources, did they use actual main title music direct from the film or did someone preserve the tracks for such older titles such as RAPTURE and NOBODY RUNS FOREVER? Also what source was used for SOMETHING WICKED...did they just use the Varese re-recordings or the actual unused soundtrack? I am very interested in this new set !

Hello Shureman !

the listing is here :
http://frenchsoundtracks.forumotion.com/annonces-questions-et-propositions-f3/nouveautes-de-novembre-2008-t145-15.htm#1242

Thanks for the response; however, we still do not know if we only get 1 track from each title, do we? And I hope the music from such titles as RAPTURE and NOBODY RUNS FOREVER is not simply taken from the film's main title which may include dialogue, background sounds, etc. Of course this is better than nothing but the same can be obtained by collectors doing their own assembly......

No, the Universal french collection's tracks was taken from original masters and doesn't contain any dialogue, background sounds, etc... I don't know the precise listing of the 6 Cds but I am sure that each film were compiled with 2 or 3 tracks ! (or one but long "suite track").

That's very good news if it's true ! Hard to believe the masters still exist for RAPTURE and NOBODY after all these years...yet not for the much more recent HOUSE ON CARROLL STREET (so say Intrada) or PARIS BY NIGHT.....for me the # of tracks per title is crucial !

According to Stéphane Lerouge and Colette Delerue, it exist a lot of goods master tracks and this future 6 CDs longbox will prove it !

here's what the official site said :

To achieve this unusual project, Georges Delerue's family granted access to the composer's personal archives, revealing a whole chapter of his work that had previously remained hidden. From the Nouvelle Vague to Platoon, and from Maurice Pialat to Oliver Stone, the life of the man and the artist gradually builds into a tangible picture, thanks to a substantial track-listing. This set is a must, especially for every fan of the work of a man whom British filmmaker Ken Russell considered to be "the greatest film-music composer of all time."

source :
http://www.georges-delerue.com/fr/news/index.php/2008/09/21/49-un-grand-rendez-vous-avec-georges-delerue

I hope you are right, kfigaro. Because it would be a bit annoying if they reused the rerecording from the so called "London Sessions" for this release. We will know for sure when it's here.

They write "composer's personal archives" and not "Varese sarabande masters"

But I hope I'm right too...

The official listing is here :
http://www.georges-delerue.com/fr/news/index.php/2008/10/30/51-le-coffret-universal-track-listing

November 17 cannot come fast enough - especially for the Delerue and the Demy compilation.

When the masters of so many scores still exist, UMF should finally start releasing THE FULL SCORES instead of more, more and more compilations I am personally quite tired with.

I don't think that only 2-3 tracks survived from some of those scores and "everything left" will be included on that 6CD set.

You are completely true but (alas) I'm not Mister Lerouge...

Explanation of the longbox by the producer him-self :

Stéphane Lerouge a écrit:

«Georges Delerue possessed a rare gift: the art of transforming a filmmaker's work. If your comedy-scene wasn't as funny as planned, Georges made it funnier. If you wanted sunshine and it was raining, he made the sun come out. Only God and Georges Delerue could perform miracles like that! It's why I did a documentary about Georges, a kind of homage to the greatest film-musician of all time.»
Dixit the tumultuous Ken Russell, a director literally inhabited by music. He was paying tribute to a brilliant character he'd worked with on a film-portrait (Don’t shoot the composer), on a feature-film (Women in love) and a friend with whom he'd shared years of brotherhood. If you listen to Russell, Delerue had not one, but several faces, like a Hindu god… These different aspects were represented in the Ecoutez le cinéma! collection right from the outset, with Godard and Contempt, his long-haul associations with Truffaut and de Broca, his rapports with jazz (Calmos and its thriller-scores), not to mention his contemporary, full-frontal inspiration when he had Everests to climb, like Police Python 357 or Quelque part, quelqu’un. The career of the man lasted through forty years of international filmmaking, yet one thing was missing: a large-scale synthesis with an unusual format. But tackling such an unreasonable project means you can also make an old dream come true: strip out all the rushes, and save every one of the master tapes in the Delerue archives, preciously kept in France and The United States. It also meant working like a slave for eighteen months: with a rhythm spread over six seasons, we had meetings at regular intervals with Colette Delerue and sound-engineer Christophe Henault. We spent days together that were often exciting, and sometimes more of a switchback-ride, alternating unlucky cards with the discovery of unsuspected gems. In the shadows of the studio, ancient decks made by Studer even welcomed tapes which, in their great majority, hadn't spun round a reel for decades. Their state of preservation turned out to be quite variable, and sometimes they betrayed the devastating effects of moisture (in which case, only one remedy would suffice: a trip to the tape-oven with the timer set to eight hours, minimum). Over eighteen months of patience (sometimes just through stubbornness), we put together a puzzle, piece by piece, some five thousand of them. And we did so by respecting to the letter a single, simple, basic methodology: «Let's continue exploring the most distant corners of this vast land; and once we've found all the pieces, then we can start the framework, and think hard about the programme, its order, structure and form.»


Our long quest, once completed by material supplied by French publishers and Hollywood majors, turned out to represent some fourteen hours of stock. So then we had to start trimming it down, and lose ballast so we could gain altitude… which, in reality, meant forgetting certain classics already published in the collection: Jules and Jim, Contempt, King of Hearts, Day for Night, That Most Important Thing: Love etc. Why bother republishing scores that were already available, we wondered... especially if it was to the detriment of other, rare - if not secret - works for which this anthology remained the only chance of exposure? In choosing to stray off the beaten track, we found that the very concept of the project had shifted, too; instead of a general-interest anthology, we found we now had a selective, free-and-easy, sentimental stroll through American or British productions that ranged from the incunabula to be found in short-films, a genre that was Delerue's foster-family in the cinema, to jingles, signature-tunes, telefilms and television series that had long been buried somewhere in the depths of our memories. In a word, it was a whole section of the deleruesque opus that we'd never imagined we'd bring to light. The result is a tribute to Delerue that has been purposefully amputated: gone are his most exploited scores, and some of those had (almost) reached saturation anyway. So this, then, was our purpose, the paradox in the ambition of this Cinéma de Georges Delerue, whose subtitle is Music famous or rare, arcane and previously unreleased.


Throughout this musical marathon, there's no lack of surprise, with revelations from the deadly charm of Rapture to the work-session for Viva Maria! (listen to Delerue's pom, pom), from far-off adventures à la Horsemen to the modern language in the scores written for Belgian short-film director Jacques Kupissonoff (for confirmation, hit the track-button for Lautréamont). Inside this set, 'mere details' (the sparkling bossa written for Jacques Tati) hold their hands out to essentials (like Dien Bien Phu and its Farewell Concerto). While the programme runs, the mosaic gradually fills out, polishing itself in between neo-baroque pieces and waltzes from the suburbs, Ellington jazz and dodecaphonic pieces... This is Delerue the artist and the man, with his shares of clarity and obscurity, certainties and contradictions, gradually taking shape over six discs and some seven hours of music. Inside, you can hear his lucky-mascot soloists (harpist Lily Laskine, sitar-player Monique Rollin); you can make some of the more exotic curiosities easier to get on with (the Gaumont jingles, or the little treatise on orchestration from Point d’interrogation); and you can even succumb to the power in his scores for some decisive works, including those misunderstood by studios, like the hypnotic, original soundtrack for Something Wicked This Way Comes, whose dark lyricism put a scare into Walt Disney executives. «And yet, confessed the composer, it was probably the most ambitious, most impolite score I wrote in The United States.» Here, then, is an invitation to travel with Georges Delerue, one of the rare French composers to have crossed so easily from Agnès Varda to Oliver Stone, on a journey between expressions of intimacy and the spectacular, from the dawn of Maurice Pialat to the twilight of George Cukor, from the New Novel (the seminal Les Gommes) to the wild stampedes of The Black Stallion, from The Day of the Jackal to The Day of the Dolphin. Publishing an anthology is a struggle against dwindling time and the erosion of memory. It's also an obstinate way of continuing to refer to Georges Delerue in the present tense.


Stéphane Lerouge
Translation: Martin Davies

source :
http://www.georges-delerue.com/fr/news/index.php

I am surprised there have been no English comments on this mammoth set yet ! Today I received in my mailbox this wonderful gift from my good friend in Belgrade, Vladimir Pivarski ! I am so excited to have this set to explore over the holidays ! I have a few brief comments to make as I have only checked out two suites: RAPTURE and NOBODY RUNS FOREVER, two of the scores that piqued my interest in this composer. First of all I am so very grateful that the original tracks have evidently survived for these two older and more obscure feature films. The suites for both are shorter than I would have liked -- approximately 5 to 6 minutes for each and I surmised that Mr. Lerouge's selections for such brief suites would probably not match mine. It turns out I'm 1/2 correct.....RAPTURE includes the beautiful main theme and end titles and some of the " madhouse " sequence....but omits the wonderful " building the scarecrow " music. NOBODY RUNS FOREVER features an alternate main title.....there's a harpsichord counterpoint that is not in the finished film, and a nice action sequence as the hero follows a villain in a stadium. However the track concludes with minor jazz background rather than the excrutiatingly beautiful end theme featuring a gut-wretching flute over most melancholy strings, a true Delerue trademark !! One can only hope the missing music will perhaps show up on yet ANOTHER compilation tribute CD !!

I hope so but I have serious doubts... these scores are too obscures for having future editions by Stephane Lerouge on the Universal collection...