Manufacturer: Virgin

Manufacturer: RCA Victor

Manufacturer: Dmg TV

When Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks collaborated on the Academy Award-winning Saving Private Ryan, an abiding passion to further honour the young fighting soldiers of WWII was born in both men, resulting in Band of Brothers, an ambitious 10-part mini-series based on historian Stephen Ambrose's account of a 101st Airborne regiment as it fought its way across Europe. In scoring the ...

Manufacturer: Sony Classical

In a musical collection that is as much soundtrack as it is score, Oliver Stone's Platoon is a breakthrough for its ability to embody the extremes of the human condition in Vietnam. While most of the songs by themselves are commonly found as representative of the era, together they become a personality. Smokey Robinson's soulful and heartfelt "Tracks of My Tears" is offset by the down-home ...

Manufacturer: Atlantic

Stan Kubrick's 1987 take on Vietnam is a strange disorientating "wriggle" through film genres and human psyche alike, and the movie ends up as a kind of docu-drama road movie where the protagonists are being wasted one by one. The original score is by Abigail Mead. Admittedly she only had to come up with a few, eerie underscore themes, but they do their job, although unaided by images her ...

Manufacturer: Wea

Hans Zimmer's lush and romantic Pearl Harbor album inverts every expectation of what a World War II epic should sound like. Zimmer previously explored the American Pacific war in The Thin Red Line (1998), though this time he takes a more commercial direction. The programme opens with the power ballad by Faith Hill, "There You'll Be", establishing in the wake of Titanic (1997) ...

Manufacturer: Hollywood

After several flops, Good Morning, Vietnam was the movie that turned Robin Williams from the popular alien of TV's Mork and Mindy into a cinema superstar. Applying a comic touch to the Vietnam conflict in the tradition of M*A*S*H and its treatment of the Korean War, the movie capitalised on Williams's fast-talking improvisation and mimicry by casting him as a madcap DJ. In a ...

Manufacturer: Polydor Group

Manufacturer: EMI

The "Essential" Purcell? Well, you could get a bunch of critics to argue about that for a few days, but in the meantime, here is a sampler of highlights from the King's Consort's three admirable Purcell series: the Complete Odes and Welcome Songs, Complete Anthems and Services, and Complete Secular Solo Songs. There are, of course, some of Purcell's most-performed pieces ...

Manufacturer: Hyperion