Music
Walt Disney’s Fantasia: Remastered Original Soundtrack Edition
March 20, 2010 by admin · 5 Comments
Amazon.com essential recording
It’s hard to believe now that Walt Disney’s bold 1940 impressionistic experiment in wedding then-state-of-the-art animation with classical music was a rather resounding failure upon its release. The cliché proves the rule: Fantasia was decades ahead of its time (Disney even launched a “psychedelic”-themed rerelease campaign in the late ’60s). It’s even harder to fathom that then-Disney management spent over a million dollars in the early ’80s replacing t… More >>
Walt Disney’s Fantasia: Remastered Original Soundtrack Edition
I bought it a couple of years ago looking at the cover but was extremely disappointed when my 18-month old insisted on “Mickey” today and I chucked it into my DVD player. Our baby started crying aloud suggesting “what is this rap?” Disney folks ought to know better not try and market elevator music for 70-year olds to little toddlers regardless of how fantasia the cover looks like!
Rating: 1 / 5
I thought that I was ordering a DVD of the original movie, which I remember seeing when it first was screened. To receive only the sound track, without any animation, was annoying to say the least. Your description of the offered product could have been more explicit.
Rating: 1 / 5
No one should expect state-of-the-art classical music when buying performances made in the 1950’s. Nostalgia is the word for this album. But nostalgia may fall a bit short as you struggle to make it through these performances. In addition to the difficulty of actually hearing the music through the scratchy (did they hold a microphone up to a record player’s speakers to capture these digital tracks?), hiss-ridden background, you may notice that the performance standards of the 1950’s were very different from today’s – and not in a good way.
The performances are overly dramatic – bombastic, even – and lack the subtlety and sophistication inherent in much of this music. These musically jarring performances were no doubt intentionally accentuated to match the animations they were intended to accompany. They don’t make the transition to audio-only without problems. With nothing to watch, you simply can’t help but listen more critically to the performances themselves, and, for me, the additional scrutiny makes the experience a chore rather than a pleasure. I really don’t know whether this is due to the soundtrack-oriented intention of Disney’s original vision, Stokowski’s dated musical judgements, the Philadelphia Orchestra’s laissez-faire performance standards, the sound-engineer’s bizarre habit of constantly varying the dynamics and stereo-imaging of the performance, or the total failure of the current album’s producers to attempt to improve any of the 1950’s technological shortcomings of the originally-recorded tracks, but the result is simply a mess – painful to listen to.
These are timeless classics, of course, and doubtless will find a receptive audience among those with fond personal memories of childhood experiences, but for for anything except the most extreme non-critical listening, these recordings do not stand the test of time at all well. And Disney should be taken to task, in my opinion, for releasing digital tracks without availing themselves of the proper technologies to improve the technical shortcomings of the original recordings, at least.
If you’re only interested in the music itself, there are far more musically satisfying performances of all of these pieces available. I urge any discerning classical music listeners to seek them out rather than suffering through these antiquated performances and recordings.
Rating: 2 / 5
I am a classical music lover. So this CD was the ideal for me. I listen to it everytime I have to study or when I need to relax.
I have absolutely no problem with it. It’s just fantastic.
Rating: 5 / 5
I was disapointed with the low-fi recording. I realize the soundtrack is from the 1940’s, but I assumed it has been re-mastered. Rather muddy sound.
Rating: 3 / 5