Description

The poster is missing. The sticker and sticker marks shown on picture 2 and 3 are on the shrink wrap

Us pressing of this rare soundtrack.

The soundtrack to The Dark Crystal, was made by Trevor Jones and are among the most melodramatic and orchestral romantic style of music that the 1980’s fantasy genre has to offer. Long before becoming famous for his brassy fanfares in such modern favorites as Last of the Mohicans and Cliffhanger, Jones was a regular composer for the Jim Henson productions of the 1980’s. His initial reaction to the concept of The Dark Crystal was to write music that was as instrumentally and harmonically challenging to the senses as the visuals. When Jones sat down with film producer Gary Kurtz long before photography commenced, though, he recognized that the animated film genre had reached the point where the stories and imagery on the screen were so foreign to the eye that the music needed to be rooted in an orchestral tradition that audiences could relate to. Interestingly, Don Bluth and Jerry Goldsmith would be making same realization at exactly the same time for The Secret of N.I.M.H. Thus, a successful style of lush orchestral romanticism was adopted industry-wide as the acceptable standard for modern animation music, an important beginning to a trend that continued many decades later. Jones would become well versed in writing music for fantasy films over the years, but his effort for The Dark Crystal resulted in a score that remains as much of a cult favorite as the film itself, not to mention arguably the strongest entry in the composer’s career. You can’t help but marvel at the sheer quantity of themes and motifs for the wide ranging characters in The Dark Crystal, and the quality is often not far behind. Each set of characters has a strong theme in The Dark Crystal (including the pleasant love theme for the two Gelflings), and Jones intentionally leaves the performances of the two primary themes separate until the crystal is unified to fulfil the prophecy at the end of the film. These ideas do share common progressions, as Jones will proudly detail, including a rising and descending series of three notes that is, in the score’s most valiant performances, its most famous calling card. The congruence of the themes in the last few minutes of the film is spectacular, with a harmony in counterpoint that clearly showed Jones’ talents at this early stage of his career. In the end, anyone who appreciates the massive orchestral beauty of the fantasy genre’s best dramatic music will be well served by any of the album releases.

Track list:
1. Overture
2. The Power Ceremony
3. The Storm
4. The Mystic Master Dies
5. The Funerals; Jen’s Journey
6. The Skeksis Duel
7. The Pod Dance
8. Love Theme
9. Gelfling Song
10. The Gelfling Ruins
11. The Landstrider Journey
12. The Great Conjunction
13. Finale