Search - Andre Previn :: Rollerball [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]

Director Norman Jewison's original 1975 Rollerball was an odd mix; half action thriller (about a future blood sport that crossbred the most violent aspects of roller derby and hockey), half futurist cautionary tale (about the dangers of all-encroaching corporate power and the decadent elite who wield it). In retrospect, it was all too prescient on both counts. It also marked one of the last major Hollywood forays of conductor-composer Andre Prévin, who conducted the film's pastiche of Bach (the ominous if clichéd Toccata and Fugue in D Minor served as the game's theme), Albinoni (the Adagio is the film's main theme), Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich. The soundtrack was produced in the wake of Kubrick's epochal uses of classical music in scoring his near-future epics 2001 and A Clockwork Orange, and the inspiration and intent here is obvious. Previn added three brief cues of his own (the evocative, modernist "Glass Sculpture" and the kitschy funk-exotica of "Executive Party" and "Executive Party Dance"). With the London Symphony under his baton, the veteran Previn produces an effective version of the Adagio and wrings appropriate drama from the Russian works as well. -?Jerry McCulley