Victory at Sea (Music from the Original Television Series) [1980]

The three suites of music from the landmark TV documentary Victory at Sea have been reissued many times in new formats, but the only reissue project so far that got it right was Mobile Fidelity's lavish half-speed-mastered three-LP box from 1985. This single disc, the first CD issue of any part of this music, misses the mark -- and perhaps one can blame the time limitations of the laser-read format. With 72 minutes to work with, this disc takes in all of Vol. 1 and only five out of the eight movements of Vol. 2, skipping Vol. 3 altogether. On the original LPs, each suite works as a integral, flowing, self-contained unit, whereas here the order is scrambled, with the excerpts from Vol. 2 interspersed between the out-of-sequence numbers from Vol. 1. So now, to cite a couple of examples, listeners end up with two finales, "The Sound of Victory" and "Victory at Sea," placed redundantly together, and "Mare Nostrum" now comes before "Beneath the Southern Cross." But the detailed remastered sound is excellent -- better than the original LPs and almost as good as the Mobile Fidelity LPs, though the older Vol. 2 excerpts are a bit thinner in texture than the Vol. 1 selections. Also, RCA chose to use the long out of print smoke-filled cover art of the original 1953 mono issue of Vol. 1 instead of the more familiar color painting of the same scene on the stereo remake. Eventually all of the music of the three suites would get out on two CDs, but without annotations, remixed in Dolby Surround Sound, and, in the case of Vol. 3, stripped of its sound effects. So this initial, admittedly well-packed sampler does have some value.