Search - Various Artists :: Les Parapluies De Cherbourg

Lovely music; strange mastering

Jonathan Rimorin | Cormorant Island | 07/26/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"First off, I love love love love love love the Jacques Demy film, which this CD contains in its entirety. I've often thought of somehow taping the soundtrack off my DVD copy of the film so I could listen to the music all the time without having to lug a DVD player and television around; so when I saw that this lavish 2-disc set was available, I snapped it up! I cannot find a single piece of music missing from the disc that appears in the film, but the track separations are somewhat disconcerting: cues that flow into one another in the film are faded out here. What's more distracting is that this edition sounds mastered from a monaural analog source, instead of the remastered soundtrack used for the re-release: there's a preponderance of sibyllance (very noticeable in a French language disc) which was presumably noise-gated for the remastering, and this edition's vocals have a hall-reverb effect which I find jarring.Nevertheless, I am glad to have this. One final note: the liner notes (in French, which I read badly) credit Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo, Anne Vernon, et al, as the characters they play in the film, but list Danielle Licari, José Bartel, Christiane Legrand, etc. as the characters' _voices_. I was always under the impression that Deneuve, et al, did their own singing; does this imply that they lip-synched their entire dialogue to someone else!?One last final note:the extra tracks, Tony Bennett doing an English version of "Récit du Cassard" and a jazz trio version of "I will wait for you" are quite nice. Get this CD, you Demyheads."

The '79 Stage Version is This CD

John Ellis | New York, NY United States | 08/29/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"The review listed before this is wrong, it's not the soundtrack but a longer stage version from 1979 with 24 cuts and different cast, of course. I don't have the film score to compare in quality, but it's a lovely score period."