Music Composed by Jerry Goldsmith
Rating: ****

One inevitable result of Goldsmith’s passing last year has been the fanatical quest of nearly every film music label to dig up every note the man wrote in the span of his 40-plus year career. It would be tempting to suggest that we’re scraping the barrel rather dry, but the truth of the matter is that Goldsmith composed such an enormous body of important work that the film music community will likely be digging through barrel for years before we even see the bottom. The Chairman is yet another excellent score to be scooped out of that proverbial barrel (don’t worry, I drop the cliché after this point), an early Goldsmith effort for a now-forgotten 1969 espionage thriller taking place in Mao Zedong’s China. As the film’s geographic location may indicate, Goldsmith’s score follows closely on the heels of his epic score for 1966’s The Sand Pebbles. Like that score, The Chairman balances romance and modernism against an oriental backdrop. But while I imagine most will consider the more momentous and blatantly thematic Sand Pebbles as the finer work, I actually find The Chairman to be a far more intriguing score. It may not have the same scope, but the thematic executions are far subtler, the Asian touches more innovative, and Goldsmith’s voice throughout feels much more prominent (as opposed to The Sand Pebbles, which rarely escaped the shadow of Goldsmith’s mentor, Alex North).

Jerry Goldsmith

The album opens with Jerry Goldsmith performing a cover arrangement of the film’s love theme on the piano (”The World that Lovers See”). It’s a charming and unabashedly romantic piece of 60s jazz (well, “jazz” in the way people consider Mancini love ballads to be “jazz” anyway), a trifle over-the-top but no worse for it given that this arrangement isn’t actually used in the film. From there, we move into darker territory with absolutely stunning “Main Title.” The cue eerily opens with a 5-note motif, a vaguely oriental phrase that Goldsmith eventually uses as the score’s calling card, but the track really picks up steam once the march begins. Beginning with a simple (though breathlessly long-winded) traditional Chinese melody on the dulcimer, Goldsmith gradually adds more and more orchestral power until the march reaches staggering proportions. Perhaps best viewed as the darker half of the “Rebel March” from Under Fire, the march is quite a powerhouse, and perfectly conjures up visions of crowds riling through the streets of Beijing to hail Chairman Mao. This is the one cue on the album that even a listener only acquainted with Goldsmith through scores like Small Soldiers would be able to identify as raw Jerry Goldsmith, and it’s worth the price of the CD alone.

From that point on, the music is far more restrained. The first half of the album flirts with romance and exotic intrigue, making liberal use of the love theme while rarely blatantly showcasing it. While small-scale in design, the romance is still potent, transpiring more towards restrained majesty than sentiment, a trait that would later become a Goldsmith signature through scores ranging from The Wind and the Lion to Masada. Gradually, action and suspense picks up, and carries the rest of the album. I suppose the action music could be described as an Asian variation on Goldsmith’s landmark score for Planet of the Apes. It’s nowhere near as harsh or audacious, but the prominent percussion (albeit, this time more concentrated on traditional Chinese percussive instruments then Planet’s anything-goes ensemble), dissonant tone clusters, and jagged rhythms definitely put the score in the same bracket. The only binding theme we really hear with any frequency comes in the form that abrasive 5-note motif, essentially standing as an eerie calling card for the cold-blooded Communists (wow, remember the days when people were actually afraid of Communists). Still, for all that, Goldsmith manages to keep things on a fairly intimate scale, rarely letting the uneasy modernism grow too oppressive. Things only truly reach bombastic proportions in the climatic “The Fence,” where the discerning listener who listens might catch glimpses of a growling brass figure that would later find a home in Goldsmith’s oppressive Poltergeist. From there, we’re taken back to a rapturous reprisal of the love theme and a towering reprisal of the Chinese march, for a particularly satisfying “End Title.”

The score apparently has a rather complex history on album, and it’s doubtful that this new release from Prometheus is going to be the final word on the subject. While they’ve done a great job cleaning up the sound, we should still note that this release is still taken directly from the original LP, and is thus missing portions of the complete score. I understand that Fox actually does have the complete master tapes recording somewhere in their vaults, and I imagine that Varese Sarabande will eventually be dusting those off. So if you already own an earlier version of this score, it may behoove you to wait a little longer. But if you haven’t yet picked up The Chairman in some form, and your fondness for Goldsmith extends past the likes of Rudy, then you’ve no reason to hesitate. The Chairman brings together many of early Goldsmith’s finest assets, and packs more depth into a brief 30 minutes than most of today’s 70-minute plus score albums could dream for. A gem.

Music Composed and Conducted by Jerry Goldsmith; Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra; Engineer: John Neal / Album edited and mastered by James Nelson; Album Produced by Ford A. Thaxton; Availability: In print, available at ; Label (Catalogue): Prometheus Records, (PCD 158); Release Date: May, 2005