August 28, 2020
Elmer Bernstein’s Expanded WILD WILD WEST Film Score Latest CD Club Album from Varèse Sarabande
Varèse Sarabande Records has announced its latest CD Club soundtrack release: WILD WILD WEST (Deluxe Edition) Original Motion Picture Score, with music composed and conducted by the late Academy Award®-winning Elmer Bernstein and performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony. The original 10-track album has been expanded to 47 tracks and over 75 minutes of music, including alternate takes and cues that were not used in the film.
An undisputed master of both westerns and comedies—to the point of being typecast in each genre—Elmer Bernstein had essentially left both to spend most of the 1990s rehabilitating his “serious” status with directors like Martin Scorsese (THE AGE OF INNOCENCE) and Francis Ford Coppola (THE RAINMAKER). Bernstein agreed to score WILD WILD WEST because he loved director Barry Sonnenfeld’s 1997 action-comedy MEN IN BLACK. “When I got a chance to work with Barry Sonnenfeld and Will Smith, I thought, cool, I’d like to do this. And when I met Barry, I really liked him and we had a great relationship,” Bernstein he once remarked. As one who studied with the prototypical western composer Aaron Copland, the film gave him a chance to write an unabashed, non-ironic throwback western theme—one that sits comfortably in his canon next to THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) and THE SHOOTIST (1976).
The Deluxe Edition soundtrack is limited to 2,000 copies, which is now available exclusively on www.varesesarabande.com and intl.varesesarabande.com.
