George Fenton - The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans (2001) Music From The BBC TV Series

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George Fenton - The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans (2001) Music From The BBC TV Series

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This soundtrack album to the acclaimed BBC television series Blue Planet – Seas of Life is by George Fenton. Isolated from their accompanying videos, soundtrack albums often just don't hold up. Even if you haven't seen this television program, however, that is not the case with the Blue Planet CD. Indeed, the music here works quite well as a "sit down and listen" album. It also seems that the neo-classical arrangements surely capture the mystery, majesty, beauty, playfulness, power, and even terror of the ocean world very well. You may be reaching for a towel after listening to this one.

Gary Hill, All Music Guide

Wildly popular in the United Kingdom, this eight-hour long series of shows by the BBC Natural History Unit aired in 2001 after its crew spent years collecting breathtaking original footage to create one of the most comprehensive ocean wildlife films of all time. The ambitious project offered a look into nearly every element of marine life, and its spectacular cinematography earned it both respect and popular success on the BBC. It was among the first of a new generation of incredible wildlife productions for television that arguably culminated in Planet Earth later in the decade. Three years prior to the debut of The Blue Planet, as the film was being assembled by teams of photographers from around the globe, the producers approached one of the foremost British composers of television and film, George Fenton, to compose the lengthy mass of music required for the episodes. The event allowed Fenton the opportunity to write for a magnificent scope that would be expected for an IMAX project, leaving no instrument unused in his effort to adequately compliment the expansive and diverse elements of the sea. After the completion of the score, the BBC Concert Orchestra and the Choir of Magdalen College in Oxford were so impressed and enthusiastic about their own performances of the score that a live concert of music from the show was arranged by the composer. On October 13th, 2001, both performing groups assembled with Fenton in the Royal Festival Hall to present highlights from the score while the show's David Attenborough narrated passages from the program projected onto a giant screen in the hall. The spectacle was followed, naturally, by a highly anticipated CD album of the music. Nobody could have expected that Fenton's music for The Blue Planet would introduce a musical style that was destined to dominate his career in the 2000's. As impressive as this score seemed at the time, Fenton elaborated on the same ideas for the Deep Blue big screen adaptation of the show a few years later and, eventually, take the concept a step further for television's Planet Earth.

It's often been the case that large-scale nature shows, whether they exist on IMAX screens or television screens, offer composers a chance to write magnificent themes and action passages of considerable length that they would otherwise not be able to expand upon for a feature film full of rapid synchronization points. What Fenton produced for The Blue Planet is not really much different from what you'd expect from the usual large-ensemble, massively epic score for an IMAX venue. Collectors of Fenton's works who clamored for his occasional outbursts of immense melody and orchestral power were finally given the opportunity to hear the five-time Academy Award nominated composer explode with lengthy renditions of several accessibly tonal and immense full-ensemble motifs, recorded with careful attention to both treble and bass contributors. The ensemble's most powerful passage, "Killer Whales," features ultra-slow tempos and ambitiously resonating tonality of relatively simple but satisfying force. Like all nature programs, though, there are extremes between cues for large vistas and those for microscopic organisms. In this case, the difference in the styles within Fenton's score exists, in the most general sense, between the jelly fish and surfing snail kind of silly animals and the deadly or serious shark and whale variety. Whereas the impressive species are accompanied by ripping, complex layers of epic proportions usually reserved for fantasy and adventure scores, the smaller, "cuter" species are accompanied by a Mediterranean pop-like lounge sounds, and your ability to sift out the program sequences that interest you will determine how much you enjoy this album. The modern acoustical rhythms in the fluffier cues are tolerable, though weak compared to the power of the fully symphonic material. The slightly ethnic flavor in "Spinning Dolphins," exhibiting a Latin style that is strangely reminiscent of Jerry Goldsmith's Silver Age material for Latin settings, stands apart from the otherwise understated, electronic rhythms of a light rock variety that provide a bubbly underscore for the less intimidating species. It's likely that film music fans will quickly skip these parts in favor of the more robust orchestral and choral cues, and rightfully so. While the diversity speaks to Fenton's talents, the album's biggest detriment is the basic inconsistency necessitated by the show's various topics.

For good reason, the title theme for The Blue Planet is what attracted the most attention to Fenton's score. As it graced the opening of each program, viewers were treated to a resoundingly superb statement of the theme with magnificent choral depth. The pulsating strings over the opening half of the theme are a remarkably effective method of addressing the movement of water. Being the choir's only performance on the album, the title track stands alone as not only the highlight of the show and album, but among the best of film and television music for all of 2001 as well. The composition may be relatively simple in its construction, but what it lacks in originality is more than compensated for by its overwhelming size. Fenton rearranges this theme's phrases of descending pairs for several cues, but he utilizes it with arguably better results in Deep Blue. Three other tracks, sans choir, exhibit notably powerful performances from the full orchestral ensemble. "Sardine Run," "Blue Whale," and "Emperors" also offer some of the best action sequences of 2001 on album, with explosive brass performances that bounce off the walls with enthusiasm. Together with several impressive orchestral cues of lesser volume later in the album (including the ethereal "Frozen Oceans" late in the presentation), there are fifteen to twenty minutes of extremely engaging orchestral material to be heard on the product. All of the ensemble performances are easy to digest, and although the acoustic and synthetic cues with modern rhythms may be tougher to enjoy, those fifteen to twenty minutes of orchestral majesty more than justify the price of the album. The only significant failing of the lighter sections on album is their odd mixing; the sound quality begins rather muted and picks up in both gain levels and clarity in later passages. The initial 2001 album was pressed by the BBC itself and therefore demanded a higher import price for Americans who stood no chance of finding it in retail stores. (An American re-pressing in 2002 with different cover art largely solved availability issues.) The Silva Screen label remastered the same contents in 2018 for a more widely available product to join their release of the less organic, more heavily processed Blue Planet II score led by Hans Zimmer, a work disloyal to Fenton's precedent. While it's easy to recommend Deep Blue as a better-rounded overall listening experience, the opening track of The Blue Planet is still among the best performances of the concept's main theme available. All these scores remain highly recommended on any album.

Editorial Review by FilmTracks.com

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George Fenton - The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans (2001) Music From The BBC TV Series

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George Fenton - The Blue Planet: A Natural History of the Oceans (2001) Music From The BBC TV Series

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