A Goldsmith Grail to Check Off Your "List"

A Goldsmith Grail to Check Off Your “List”

February 11, 2014 By Mike Duquette — No Comments

Adrian Messenger How did you celebrate yesterday, which would have been the 85th birthday of revered film composer Jerry Goldsmith (1929-2004)? Did you play some of the great recent reissues of some of his most classic scores? It’s safe to say whatever you did, Varese Sarabande did it one step ahead: yesterday the label announced the long-awaited releases of one of Goldsmith’s most enduring and unavailable scores, 1963’s The List of Adrian Messenger.

Based on a 1959 novel of the same name, Adrian Messenger, directed by John Huston finds George C. Scott as a retired British intelligence officer following a late writer friend’s mysterious hunch that a recent string of seemingly accidental deaths are in fact a string of murders. An all-star cast, largely hidden by makeup and disguises (including Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra), adds an extra layer of fun to this suspenseful picture.

The year before Adrian Messenger, Goldsmith began to make a name for himself after years writing scores for television shows (Dr. Kildare, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Twilight Zone – a feature film of which he’d score in 1983). 1962 saw the release of Lonely Are the Brave, a Western with a fantastic score by the composer, and Freud, whose atonal score netted Goldsmith his first of 18 Oscar nominations. (He’d only win once, for The Omen.) Adrian Messenger‘s thrilling but intimate score was some of Goldsmith’s finest work to date, and an exciting preview of the years to come.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc63KNjNHYA]

Varese’s CD features the complete score for The List of Adrian Messenger for the first time on any format, limited to just 3,000 copies. Discs will ship the week of February 24, so place your orders fast!

Jerry Goldsmith, The List of Adrian Messenger: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Varese Sarabande VCL 0214 1449, 2014 – original film released 1963)

Prologue/Main Title/Gleneyre
Death in Disguise
Le Borg Remembers
Back in the Ditch
Cat and Louse
It’s a Gasser
Lost Love
Assault on Slattery
The Brush Off
The Gypsy
Beagles and Fox
Quail Hunt
Baiting the Trap
It’s a Drag
Broom’s Doom
End Cast

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Mike Duquette

Mike Duquette (Founder) was fascinated with catalog music ever since he was a teenager. A 2009 graduate of Seton Hall University with a B.A. in journalism, Mike paired his profession with his passion through The Second Disc, one of the first sites to focus on all reissue labels great and small. His passion for reissues turned into a career, having written at and worked for all three major catalogue music labels and contributing to Allmusic, Billboard, Discogs, City Pages and Ultimate Classic Rock. He's penned liner notes for Verve, Chess, Mondo and Soul Music Records.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Mike lives in Astoria, Queens with his wife, a cat named Ravioli, twin daughters and a large yet tasteful collection of music.