John Barry – Dances With Wolves (1990) [SACD Reissue 2000] SACD ISO + Hi-Res FLAC

John Barry seems to have that unique ability to transform the genres he tackles; for Dances with Wolves , he brought to the Western epic a voice of romance, drama and moments of melancholy. The beauty of his Oscar-winning score on SACD, bringing you Barry’s complete score for the first time!

John Barry’s fifth Oscar-winning score is a profoundly moving body of music, generally (though not entirely) elegiac in tone, very much like the movie for which it was written. It’s also a bit of a mixed bag, occasionally falling back on material that will be familiar to fans of the James Bond movies that Barry scored during the early- to mid-’60s. The main title theme uses some of those devices — dense, heavy string passages adjacent to trumpet calls — but it is hardly representative of the full score. The real heart of Dances With Wolves is the pensive, tragic “John Dunbar Theme,” which is far closer in spirit to Barry’s music for Somewhere in Time or They Might Be Giants — films (and scores) far removed from the Bond movies. It seems as though, when Barry is asked to write music for characters who are complex and troubled (Bond is neither), he delivers the goods in the guise of musical material that reflects those elements. Some elements familiar from the Bond films can be found scattered throughout this soundtrack, particularly in the violin-driven “stings” that open “The Death of Timmons” and the horn calls that herald its closing; in the string parts underneath the hyperactive percussion of “Pawnee Attack” that might’ve been lifted right out of From Russia With Love; and also in “Stands With a Fist Remembers,” with its secondary violin part in the upper register of the strings. Much of Dances With Wolves, however, shows a broadening of Barry’s sound — he uses the vast canvas of Kevin Costner’s movie and Dean Semler’s cinematography as the basis for one of the most richly scored soundtracks of his career, working with one of the largest orchestras ever heard in one of his films; “Journey to Fort Sedgewick,” “Kicking Bird’s Gift,” “Two Socks at Play,” “The Death of Cisco,” and “Journey to the Buffalo Killing Ground” have an almost Copland-like majesty about them, and “The Buffalo Hunt” is one of the finest pieces of music the man ever wrote. At times, it sounds as though Barry had every string and horn player in Los Angeles present, and topped it all out with an oversized percussion section, but none of the music or the scoring here sound excessive.

Tracklist:

01. Main Title – Looks Like a Suicide
02. The John Dunbar Theme
03. Journey to Fort Sedgewick
04. Ride to Fort Hays
05. The Death of Timmons
06. Two Socks – The Wolf Theme
07. Pawnee Attack
08. Kicking Bird’s Gift
09. Journey to the Buffalo Killing Ground
10. The Buffalo Hunt
11. Stands With a Fist Remembers
12. The Love Theme
13. The John Dunbar Theme
14. Two Socks at Play
15. The Death of Cisco
16. Rescue of Dances With Wolves
17. The Loss of the Journal / The Return to Winter Camp
18. Farewell and End Title