Manufacturer: Nettwerk Records

Not only is The Nightmare Before Christmas one of the best musicals of the past two decades; it may well be Danny Elfman's masterpiece, successfully integrating his main influences (from Cab Calloway to Nino Rota) into a fantastic whole. The first disc of this reissue features the original soundtrack, its songs still teetering between dark humor and poetic flights of fancy; this so-called ...

Manufacturer: Walt Disney Records

Score composer Howard Shore has informed this first installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy with his distinctly modern sensibilities. Revolving loosely around a brief, heroic brass theme, this epic is infused with a powerful rhythmic thrust and a musical range that encompasses centuries (from the Renaissance pastoralism of "Concerning Hobbits" to the fiery, Prokofiev-influenced drama ...

Manufacturer: Reprise / Wea

Leonard Bernstein's musical update of Romeo and Juliet, with a young Stephen Sondheim's brilliant lyrics, had already galvanized Broadway with its vivid reinvention as a parable of racial intolerance and generational conflict. But director Robert Wise's lavish widescreen presentation broke fresh ground by taking the story to its most impressionable audience, the teenagers who could identify ...

Manufacturer: Sony

Chip Davis's Mannheim Steamroller hasn't lost any ground in the six years since their last Yuletide offering. Christmas Extraordinare is another innovative and heartfelt collection of seasonal treasures played on a combination of 18th-century instruments and modern-day synthesizers, drums, and electric guitars. While not the first to marry different ages of musical instruments, Davis and ...

Manufacturer: American Gramaphone

Bring home BROADWAY'S NEWEST HIT, LITTLE MERMAID! The Brand-New Cast Recording of Broadway's Sparkling New Musical featuring the beloved hits from the film PLUS 10 ALL-NEW SONGS from the Broadway Show!

Manufacturer: Disney

Manufacturer: WEA/Reprise

This recording captures the 1985 London cast that transformed an obscure French musical based on Victor Hugo's gargantuan novel of pre-Revolutionary France into a worldwide phenomenon throughout the late-'80s and '90s and became one of the best examples of the era's trend of blockbuster musical spectacles. Yes, Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg's score tends to recycle its themes, but the ...

Manufacturer: Red Ink

For this Nancy Meyers-directed romantic comedy, Hans Zimmer serves up a breezy score quite different from the more heavy-duty works he's become known for. This may have something to do with the film's tone, of course, but also with the fact that Zimmer has sole credit on only two cues, having co-written the others with members of his extensive stable of helpers, including guitarist Heitor Pereira ...

Manufacturer: Varese Sarabande

The great irony of John Barry's Academy Award-winning score for Out of Africa (which also took the Oscar as Best Picture) is that it almost never was; director Sydney Pollack had originally envisioned the film with native African music, going as far as laying the indigenous score down as he was editing. But the weight of John Barry's arguments--not to mention his considerable track record ...

Manufacturer: Mca