Big Country: 60th Anniversary Remastered Edition [Original MGM Motion Picture Soundtrack]

If it were possible to rate a record here at higher than five stars, this might be the place to do it, as a sort of "best of the best." Jerome Moross' soundtrack from The Big Country (1958) was one of the earlier albums in the output of United Artists Records, but it has never had an official re-release on CD, evidently because the master tapes for the album are long-missing (as a unit of a movie distributor -- which is what United Artists was, rather than an actual studio -- without its own lot and storage facilities, a lot of master materials for film-related UA Records releases are unaccounted for). This CD takes a leap beyond the gap left by the absence of the album -- the producers at Screen Classics put together this extraordinary CD of the complete, unmixed music from the actual scoring session for the movie itself. Apart from containing about double the music that was ever on the LP, there are numerous advantages to the use of the material -- in recording the music for the movi