Buy it... the 1997 Special Edition albums over all others because they feature the best combination of outstanding packaging and a complete presentation of John Williams' music.

Avoid it... the 1986 - 1993 albums because of poorer sound quality and incomplete presentation, as well as the 2004 re-pressings that are identical to the 1997 albums and without the superior packaging.

Williams

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back: (John Williams) With John Williams having firmly established himself as "the maestro" with his efforts of the late 1970's, The Empire Strikes Back came at the heart of Williams most product time of his career. Within six years, fans would be treated to everything from Star Wars and Superman to Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and Return of the Jedi, and yet, even during that incredible time, some collectors of Williams maintain that The Empire Strikes Back is the finest score of the lot. Other debates exist about The Empire Strikes Back as the best of the classic Star Wars trilogy scores, to which you'd probably get less resistance if you argue on its behalf. Following Star Wars was no easy task; the film had set all world box office records and the LP record album had sold over 4 million copies... easily the top selling score of all time. This concerned Williams, for he wished to maintain the Wagnerian approach to 19th Century Romanticism in his music and balance the previous film's primary themes with several new ones. Offering a retread was the last thing he wanted to do. With the saga now stretching to two trilogies, you get the feeling from The Empire Strikes Back that Williams was creating a monster, setting a standard of incorporating new and old themes into each picture that would eventually make the idea of that very incorporation quite daunting by the final venture (given the wealth of previous themes). For The Empire Strikes Back, Williams would return to the London Symphony Orchestra, with the majority of performers veterans of the first score's recording. Consisting of 18 recording sessions over two weeks, the task of assembling the score for the sequel was made more difficult due to the fact that it was roughly 40 minutes longer than Star Wars. With the same supporting crew, however, Williams succeeded in his recording and debuted the film's two primary themes in his first conducting appearance at a concert with the Boston Pops several weeks before the release of the film. The double-LP album for The Empire Strikes Back sold over a million copies in just four months, but never unseated its predecessor in record or box office sales, finishing firmly in the #2 position.

Whether he intended it or not, Williams, in his creation of new themes for The Empire Strikes Back, penned a theme that would endure longer and be more recognizable than the title theme so dearly loved from both films. When discussing themes in The Empire Strikes Back, it's hard not to become fixated on the "Imperial March," the theme devised by Williams to represent the Galactic Empire as a whole and Lord Vader on a personal level. Its incredibly simplistic, minor-key structure is devilishly successful in conveying determination and evil while, at the same, expresses itself in enjoyably bombastic, self-important fashion. Because its structure is so basic, Williams can interpolate it into any of his other themes, and, as heard in the prequel scores, insert it with great stealth as a foreshadowing device. Its place in cinematic history is often underplayed by critics who perhaps devalue the theme because of its existence in a sequel score (and maybe that's why it lost its bid for an Oscar), but it is still played endlessly in sports arenas and other public venues in post-2000 America. The prequel scores only extend the theme's life as well, especially with its magnificent announcement at the end of Attack of the Clones. So far-reaching is its influence that an official Al-Queda propaganda video near the time of the 9/11 attacks used Williams' Imperial March beneath its Arabic dialogue to represent the "Imperial United States" (one has to wonder what Williams thinks about such things...). In its different incarnations, the Imperial March is best known for its concert version. However, a rejected version of the theme, with harsh and atonal brass performing the bass rhythm instead of the straight strings, was originally to be heard during the introduction of the Star Destroyer fleet near the beginning of the film. With the concert version placed over much of this cue, fans might not know that an arguably superior version exists. That rejected "Aboard the Executor" cue, while tantalizing fans with its use in the appropriate place in the corresponding radio drama for The Empire Strikes Back, only finally appeared on album by the time of the 1997 Special Editions. Different versions of the "End Credits" suite also exist, once again leaving the better rendition of the Imperial March out of the original film. On album, fans' frustration with the incomplete presentations prior to 1997 often revolved around the lack of the Imperial March snippets that you hear throughout the film whenever the scene shifts to a Star Destroyer.

Also gracing the score for The Empire Strikes Back is "Yoda's Theme," a benign and touching theme for wisdom and restraint, and the lovely love theme for "Han Solo and the Princess" that weaves in and out throughout the entire score. The theme for Yoda has proven long-lived (it's even heard in E.T.), though the love theme for The Empire Strikes Back is arguably the most beautiful one of the entire series. Along with the "force" theme from the first film, the love theme from the second film carries a very heavy, mournful sensibility with it... something obviously necessary given the unhappy ending of The Empire Strikes Back. Two important sub-themes call this score home --not appearing to any great degree in the other scores: a motif for Boba Fett and an upbeat march for Lando's Cloud City both exist in the latter half of the film. The precision of application for each theme in Star Wars: A New Hope is really what propelled the structural success of that score (outside of the raw emotion of the "force theme" during the binary sunset and burning homestead cues). In The Empire Strikes Back, Williams takes that precision one step further and applies a far deeper emotional palette. A more heart-wrenching score, The Empire Strikes Back is significantly heavier on the drama and lighter on the sci-fi action. No cue exemplifies this idea clearer than the extended "Carbon Freeze" cue, extending from a desperate performance of the love theme prior to Solo's freezing through Boba Fett's agonizing departure. When you saw The Empire Strikes Back for the first time, you got the feeling that damn near everything was going wrong --as it should be-- and part of that feeling was the ambience of a relentless uphill struggle created by Williams' score. It is a rhythmic score, with Lando's processional and Fett's departure yielding to a hyperspace motif (a very underrated portion of the score) that churns with suspense as our heroes attempt to cut their losses and escape at the end. The Imperial March itself is the ultimate extension of this rhythmic approach, and it symbolizes the inevitable path towards the dark side with great effectiveness. The presentation of themes in the "End Credits" of The Empire Strikes Back is easily the most enjoyable of any of its peers from either trilogy, melding the four primary themes with elegance.

Regarding the albums for The Empire Strikes Back, much of the same information applies to this score as it did for Star Wars, but with one major twist. The original LP record release was a double-album, with two LPs featuring a significant amount of score from the film. When the album was translated from this medium onto CD, the content was cut down to one CD, making the LP far more of a collector's item. Also in favor of the LP was a stunning booklet presentation within. The history of the album on CD, however, shares the fact that every time you think you've purchased the definitive and final version of any of the classic trilogy scores, you can wait a few years and be treated to yet another re-release in the stores. While the existence of all of the music from the classic Star Wars film scores is taken for granted today, the first fifteen years were quite lean for Williams fans. It would take a full twenty years before the entire finished products --with every available cue released-- would finally reach fans in time for the Special Editions in theatres. Much of the information that follows, regarding each of the various releases of the score, is relevant to not only this score, but the others in the classic trilogy as well, so you'll read very similar accounts in the Filmtracks reviews of those scores as well. After their initial, separate releases on LP records, the CD editions of the scores have always been released as a trilogy, despite your ability to usually buy them separately upon each update of all three. The first album release of The Empire Strikes Back, as mentioned before, reduced the 1980 2-LP release from 75 minutes down to 42 minutes and rearranged some of the cues. It was, surprisingly, released by Polydor as a bargain item in 1985 even before Star Wars made it onto CD in its original LP form in 1986. Considering the mass of music unreleased from this score, the fans of course searched for comfort in, once again, the only alternative source of music from the series: Charles Gerhardt and the National Philharmonic Orchestra.

The only substantial alternative for music from this score (and the others in the saga before 1993) was the Charles Gerhardt re-recording of 45 minutes of the score with the NPO. For years, Gerhardt and the NPO had recorded famous film scores from mostly the Golden Age of Hollywood, but as a few of their final collaborations, Gerhardt recorded the three classic Star Wars scores near the times of their release. For The Empire Strikes Back, the 1980 recording for LP record remained absent from CD shelves for a longer period than the other two classic trilogy scores. His versions of Star Wars and Return of the Jedi had been released in 1989 by RCA, but Gerhardt's The Empire Strikes Back recording took until 1992, when Varèse Sarabande finally pressed the album. For over a year, this Gerhardt CD was the only digital source for music that had appeared on the original LP for The Empire Strikes Back but had been striped from the official CD. A newly arranged performance of the "Imperial March" (adding some "Carbon Freeze" cue material to the start) is a highlight despite weak brass. Even more so than for Star Wars, the ultimate trilogy Star Wars Anthology released by 20th Century Fox in 1993 was considered a godsend by fans. The anthology finally offered the contents of the LP and several extra cues as well, serving fans with a much more significant boost than they would receive from the other two scores in the set. Produced by some of the biggest names in film score production, the additional music was certainly welcomed with great anticipation. There were, however, problems with the presentation of that music, despite the best intentions of the producers. The anthology put as much music from each film on an individual CD for each of the three scores, but then pressed additional unreleased cues on a fourth CD that spanned all three scores. Thus, to get cues such as the massive and vital "Carbon Freeze/Luke Pursues the Captives/Departure of Boba Fett" and "Drawing the Battle Lines/Leia's Instructions" you would have to insert the fourth CD to enjoy them. Add on a large, custom-sized package (roughly DVD size by today's standards) and hard-to-read individual CD covers within, and you had some ill-received protests from some fans.

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The anthology release of 1993 is looked upon with fondness by many Star Wars fans today simply because it filled a major void in collections at the time. In 1997, however, the anthology was rendered largely outdated by the massive, highly advertised RCA Special Edition releases of 1997. By January of that year, George Lucas had announced the production of The Phantom Menace and revealed newly enhanced versions of the original three films for a 20th anniversary theatrical release. On album, fans were treated to double-CD releases of each Star Wars score in film order with alternative cues and extensive attention to detail in the mixing and arrangement. Including the alternate version of the end titles that actually made it into The Empire Strikes Back (attached to the end of a Return of the Jedi cue for some reason), a total of 124 minutes of music on this special edition made it the definitive release. Extensive notes and pictorials graced both the 1993 and 1997 releases, with the glittery CDs of the latter series a nice touch. Later in 1997, these albums were re-packaged by RCA and offered in slimline packages that feature the special edition poster art, but these fell out of print about five years later. In 2004, the Sony Classical label, which had been releasing the second trilogy scores, had acquired the rights to the classic scores and decided to re-press the 1997 releases with new artwork. These 2004 albums offer Sony's Direct Stream Digital remastering, and while this technique does provide some minimal extra clarity on high-end stereo systems, casual listeners will notice no significant change since the 1997 albums. Thus, if you own the special edition albums and don't require slightly improved sound, there is no reason to seek the 2004 ones. In fact, the 2004 albums are badly lacking in packaging compared to previous releases, with absolutely none of the fantastic notes and pictorials presented in the 1993 or 1997 releases. Essentially, you can look upon the 2004 albums as nothing more than a re-pressing of existing streamlined albums. Overall, owning The Empire Strikes Back is just as important as owning the other entries in the classic trilogy, and with its outstanding packaging and complete presentation of music, the 1997 special edition album (the original full version bound in black booklets) continues to be the best The Empire Strikes Back product available.

Score as Heard in Film: *****
1985 Polydor: *
1992 Varèse Sarabande Gerhardt: ****
1993 Fox Anthology: ****
1997 RCA Special Edition: *****
2004 Sony Classical: ****
Overall: *****

Bias Check:

For John Williams reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.72 (in 63 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.67 (in 299,177 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.