The Egyptian (complete film score)

"This is a classic example of a film score that has become far more famous than the movie it was composed for.

A mystical epic about an Egyptian wanderer seeking the meaning of life in the time of the Pharaohs, The Egyptian was made in 1954 and could have been a great movie had 20th Century Fox stuck with its plan to cast the young Marlon Brando in the lead role. However, bland contract player Edmund Purdom got the part instead and supporting players Jean Simmons and Victor Mature couldn't save it.

Because composer Alfred Newman was busy with other work, he collaborated on the film with Bernard Herrmann, who wrote many great Alfred Hitchcock scores including Vertigo and Psycho.

This beautifully recorded performance, conducted by Willam Stromberg, features 71 minutes of the mysterious, brooding and evocative joint score."
--Review by Andy Cooper, The Leader-Post, January 15, 2007

Great film music - music composed for the only art form created in the 20th Century - can stand alone as a great symphonic experience.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in the case of 20th Century Fox's The Egyptian (1954), a unique one-time collaboration between two of the greatest artists who ever composed music for the cinema, Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann.

This legendary score for one of the first wide-screen epics is as colorful and complex as any tone poem composed by Strauss or Rimsky-Korsakov. As symphonic music, The Egyptian is rich in orchestral colors, complex orchestrations and chorus, all coming together to literally recreate a long ago time and place where courtly intrigue, martyrdom, and a triumph of the human spirit kindled a new way of believing: monotheism, as embodied in the worship of the sun-god, Aton.

The results of the Newman-Herrmann collaboration were so spectacular, the film music from The Egyptian has earned a life of its own.