The cue ends with a bawdy recap of the Mimi theme, which is quite different from its exotic debut in “Agent Mimi Locked in Her Room,” and the triste Soviet lament “Mimi’s Lament” with gorgeous solo violin and strings.

The score’s first set of cues offer a nice fusion of Bacharach’s classical / jazz lounge style with more breathy flutes and brushed drums (“The Widow of Duty Fiona”), source cues featuring bagpipes (“Pipe Lament”), harpsichord, and a swaggering, super-cool spy rhythm.Īlso restored are the short comedic bits that make up whole cues and traced a series of elaborate, ridiculous gags, but perhaps the best among the new cues are the Berlin cuts which were wholly, sorely missing from the LP, such as “Old Berlin House / Mata-Hari School for Spies.” Bacharach creates some great contrast with a spiraling piano figure and eerie accordion in the cue’s first half, and returns to the instrumental combination in the finale, adding a weird wooden boing-rattle and reverberating triplet on farting brass. Restored are quotations of John Barry’s Born Free and Georges Auric’s Moulin Rouge (brief, but mandatory to the score’s fast-moving insanity), not to mention cue extensions which were excised to keep the original LP short, tight, and sweet. Along with finally hearing favourite unreleased cues, the next-biggest surprise is how well the score flows separate from the film.

The DME-extracted stems are not in stereo (and there will be uber-fans asking why the label didn’t create a stereo-mono series of hybrid tracks), but they still reveal the brilliance and lunacy of Bacharach’s music. Quartet’s 2-disc set features the original score as meticulously reconstructed from an isolated music stem from the films’ DME (dialogue, music, and effects) mix, and on CD 2, a transfer of the album master, taken from the Spanish LP master housed in RCA’s Spanish vaults, untouched since 1967.

To peg the score’s release history as confusing is an understatement, and until master tapes one day emerge (perhaps lying besides the uncut negative of Welles’ Magnificent Ambersons, and von Stroheim’s uncut Greed), this is as good as it gets. Special Notes: 8-page colour CD booklet / 64-page colour booklet with extensive liner notes / slip case / Limited to 1500 copiesĪ little more than a year after the release of Kritzerland’s CD of Casino Royale (1967), this long in-progress production of a restored score album debuted via Spain’s exacting Quartet Records, giving fans of the film and composer Burt Bacharach more music than ever. Label: Quartet Records (Spain) / Released: February 28, 2012

Casino royale 1967 album mono or stereo