Richard Band

Stargate Sg-1 Richard Band

World premiere, in depth look at Richard Band music for highly successful MGM TV series Stargate SG-1! Adaptation by Jonathan Glassner, Brad Wright of exciting 1994 sci-fi fantasy film from Dean Devlin, Roland Emmerich became phenomenally popular television series lasting ten seasons and spawning two spinoffs. Richard Dean Anderson, Michael Shanks, Amanda Tapping, Christopher Judge star. Stories themselves followed film plot about large, circular Egyptian artifact serving as gateway to another world, eventually creating new characters and developing story elements of its own over the ten year run. Richard Band scored several episodes across the first two seasons in 1997 & 1998. Using a compositional palette of synthesizers augmented by small instrumental ensembles, Band fashioned evocative sci-fi soundscapes with a degree of symphonic architecture. Melodies both haunting, dramatic trade with exciting action cues, militaristic percussion sequences. Band's harmonic vocabulary melds rich, highly accessible chordal ideas with intense, aggressive vernacular to create unusually wide range of material. Intrada 2-CD release, mastered from two-track digital scoring session mixes, courtesy MGM, features not just brief excerpts but fully-developed "suites" from three separate episodes plus entire finale written for a fourth program that otherwise did not feature further original Richard Band music. "Cold Lazarus" from Season One introduces Band to the series with a dramatic tale involving crystalline alien life forms, painful memories revived, an alien planet environment and profuse action leading to a moving finale. Band captures all of it in his 37-minutes score. "In The Line Of Duty", from Season Two, offers story elements with an alien planet under attack, rescues and moving earthbound drama. Band provides dynamic action material, lyrical love music and haunting mysticism in his half-hour score. "The Serpent's Lair", opening Season Two, offers pulsating action music for a pending Goa'uld warship invasion of planet earth. "Singularity", from Season One, introduces young Cassandra, sole plague survivor of an alien planet. Band creates a beautiful theme that trades with suspenseful ideas for the discovery a bomb inside the girl plus dramatic material for surgery scenes intended to save her from an explosive demise. Additional rewarding highlights of the scores are moving and dramatic interpolations of original Stargate themes composed by David Arnold for the 1994 feature, often heard as episode finales. Informative notes by Jeff Bond feature inside booklet, original MGM series artwork features in "flipper-style" cover design by Kay Marshall. Richard Band composes, orchestrates. Intrada Special Collection 2-CD set available while quantities and interest remain