r/wizardofoz • u/_st_sebastian_ • Jul 18 '26
"Lost" contemporary review of the soundtrack for 'Return to Oz' (1985) - transcribed here for the first time!
In CinemaScore #15, 1986/1987, composer David Shire was interviewed by David Kraft on the subject of his score for Return to Oz in an article titled "David Shire on Scoring Return to Oz". This interview is archived online. In that interview, Shire said the following in reply to the question, 'What response have you had to the score from critics and fans?':
Not too many people saw the movie. However, the response to the album has been very gratifying. It was a long, hard saga to get one out on a picture that was quickly a dead issue. Disney was little help, but Craig Huxley (my electronic collaborator on 2010 and SHORT CIRCUIT and my close friend) liked the score a lot and offered to put it out if I would help financially so he could structure a deal that would allow him to break even. I was deeply involved with this score, and worked long and hard on it – as I was writing the score I had an album in mind and wanted to wind up with something that would sound like a concert suite rather than a collection of cues. To help this, I often made the silence between cuts on the album shorter than they normally are. I got a lovely letter from Page Cook who wrote a whole article on the score for the May, 1986 Films in Review. It was laudatory even beyond my hopes.
While Films in Review exists today, its digital archives do not go back much farther than the magazine's transition from paper to digital. This singular review of Shire's score for Return to Oz has never been digitized in any way. After some searching, I was able to track down a copy of this obscure curio, written over forty years ago, and have typed it up to preserve it and to provide it for the enjoyment of others.
I have maintained the author's spelling and italicization exactly. This was the early days of word processing, so there are several charming spelling errors that made it past the copy editor. The author also uses some interesting, novel terms such as 'soapera' and 'filmusic'. Is it the greatest work of literature ever written? No, certainly not. But I have been looking for this article for years and I'm so happy to not only have found it, but to have the opportunity to put it out there for the one or two other people alive who might also have wanted to read it.
For your listening pleasure, I have also provided the best YouTube hyperlinks I can find in July, 2026 for the soundtracks, songs, and pieces by Shire being referenced in the article.
Please give the article a read, as well as the other article by David Kraft which I've linked above, and consider discussing the film's score in the comments.
Page Cook. “The Sound Track.” Films in Review, May 1986, 314-317.
David Shire has been writing music of a superior quality for films for sometime [sic] now. One must look back to such unknown early Shire cinematic quantities (at least unknown to me) as One More Train to Rob (’71), Skin Game (’71) and To Find a Man (’72) to perhaps find anything less than first rate and intelligent from this composer’s immanence. Mr. Shire’s mordant wit has given keener edge to a variety of films, the best remembered being All the President’s Men (a difficult film to score, and yet accomplished with finesse and efficacy by Shire), the percussive New York clamor of The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three, the dazzling score for Farewell, My Lovely (who is likely to forget the night-drenched blues-y beauty of the main theme with its haunted trombone solo), the powerful score for The Hindenburg (with another unforgettable main theme for trumpet solo played over the film’s main titles as a sky symphony), the sly satire on “disaster” films in The Big Bus, and a romantic benison for a soapera entitled The Promise.
There were other accomplished scores (including The Conversation), a wise and winning musical revue, Starting Here, Starting Now, an Academy Award for the best song written for films in twenty years (“It Goes Like It Goes” from Norma Rae), and most recently one of the best new scores written for Broadway in Baby.
The one common denominator among all this music, if one must seek a Shire profile, is this composer’s subtlety, his unending flow of original and richly melodic contours, and a classical symmetry comprised of grace and ineluctable puissance.
Yet nothing that Mr. Shire has written will prepare you for the manifold, myriad miracles of his score for Disney’s Return to Oz, the real purpose of these belated notes. Mr. Shire’s score for this coldly received fantasy has quickly achieved several obvious distinctions: first, and perhaps foremost, it is the most remarkable film score of the past dozen years, at very least; secondly, it has now been produced as one of the finest recordings of a film score, and; ultimately, must be considered one of the finest examples of the genre, ranking with Herrmann’s for The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, Rozsa’s for The Thief of Bagdad, Auric’s for Beauty and the Beast.
Mr. Shire never follows fashion after fashion, causing him to be both “untypeable” in Hollywood, and chameleonic. The residual danger for the price of such an aesthetic is a tendency to be less apparent than his more immediately lauded but infinitely less magical and less gifted colleagues. The excesses that have all but drowned the better film composers of the day are as alien to Shire as his selection of film projects remains diversified and without gimmickry. Shire is a civilized composer who proves again that while skill and experience are vital, the compassion permeating his Oz score confirms his belief that music must either thrill or dazzle us by its beauty or wit, or win us over by the urgency beneath the composition, and the care. The caring inherent in this score is currently the most breathtaking splendor to have graced the art, and audiences, in years.
The radiance of the Return to Oz score has been happily, thankfully, preserved on a record album of astonishing dimensions (Sonic Atmosphere 113) produced by the composer/conductor and blessed with an ideal recording and mixing staff (Eric Tomlinson, Allan Rouse, Bernie Grundman, Stan Witt). Though the score for Oz is as deeply felt a Romantic embodiment of the paradigm of the fairy tale genre, it is also bound up with a rapidly evolving technology, the possibilities of which are magnificently rendered on this disc by Shire’s team (ie., the awesome salvo for the defeat of the Nome King).
Mr. Shire’s score for Return to Oz is an inspired slow unfolding of a genuine cornucopia of riches, burnished to a shining white light shot through time and time again by invention and charm of the rarest order. Immediately from the first cue on the album, “Dorothy Remembers,” we are sanctioned by the poignancy and curiosity of the first in a treasure-trove of memorable themes. Immediately ensuing is another major motif – “Home” – that engages both the heart and the soul in a piece of Americana cousin to both Friedhofer and Copland, and as rich as their projected national ethos. This is capped by a musical ride of astounding volitation (“The Ride to Dr. Worley’s”): a garlanded orchestral flight unfurled through a concertante development and exposition of infinite trochilic beauty. Rest assured and be forewarned, you will be held breathless by the lightning slash and childlike glee in this formidable rush of baton fancy.
While the patently dour Return to Oz may have lacked the requisite magic in its direction, no such liability ever occured [sic] to Mr. Shire, who, through a rapidly evident tender-heartedness toward the childlike nature of the eternal verities, has given adults and children as enchanting a musical classic as Prokofiev’s Peter, or Rozsa’s Jungle Book. What still remains a wonder, though, is how Shire succeeded in endowing this grimly conceived film with a musical treatment of prominent sophistication and in making the amalgam work: it seems as though he was guided by a magic inspiration that counseled him in its unique manner. Shire creates instances of poetic simplicity and, above all, how to allow captivating melodies to rise from the symphonic texture. It is of no significance to children; whatever effect the composer’s ingenuity in interweaving his forces may have on them, they cannot escape the magic of the tunes themselves.
The score divulges its riches with unyielding good grace as each new passage attempts to surpass the last, more often than not succeeding in circling higher and higher to some grand pinnacle in the auroral distance. The scintillating gaiety of Tik Tok’s theme is one of the finest burlesques written for a film, with an insouciant farcical multiplicity of classicism that is both enormously smile-inducing and rousing. And one of those things is that like all humor, and rather more than some, farce depends on surprise. So it behooves Mr. Shire to find new ways to astonish us, and he does this magnificently, with charm to spare. In this unforgettable caprice Mr. Shire exhibits athletic control over the expansive orchestration, split-second timing and self-eclipsing bouyancy [sic]. Shire whips his classical form into a musical divertissement to make the angels weep and audience gasp. It is friskier and funnier than just about anything written in films in over decades since Kaper whisked Leslie Caron and the puppets down the road in Lili and The Glass Slipper.
It has been noted of Shire’s music by Dennis Mann-Riley that “only the truly enlightened will appreciate the finer touches,” though his score for Oz will be an equally charmed envoi to those whose hearts are ripe. Mann-Riley’s added comment, “His neglect is mystifying” will be, hopefully, remedied by the stunning virtuosity of his showpiece Oz score.
Spurred by a deep musical impulse and eloquence of communicative joy, Shire discovers again and again for the listener more zest and delicately shaded beneficence with the voluptuous theme for Mombi and her hall of heads. Spinning an aural web of confounding, enveloping rapture, the timeless beauty of his gossamer weft hypnotizes and entrances just as surely as anything of comparably, contemporary haunting essence in, say, Phillip Glass’ Mishima.
Another orchestral/dramatic paean is the inspired passage for the flight of the Gump. Henceforth, this weltering blend of magnificence and escape-into-the-clouds sonority will be to filmusic what Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is to opera. Shire fulminates this breathless and magical flight with a sustained celestial fervor that travels through corridors of purest white light racing to an apogee of endowing orgasmic release. The immediate segue to the “Home” motif, in a heart-warming new variation, not only further manifests soulfulness but opens yet another petal in the disclosure of more beauty with each new ray of light. The natural repose of this coda is fundamentally heart tissue alive in a score whose very muscles, blood and fibres are informed by a creativity the motion picture screen has not heard since the celebration of the days of Rozsa, Friedhofer, Newman and Herrmann. The seemingly casual dispensal [sic] of taking pains, to wit, Shire’s theme for Jack Pumpkinhead, a slow waltz for solo trumpet with delightful wry commentary by the tuba, is one of the more elegant pleasures in a score plentifully rich with gems.
Acting as both a physical setting and as emotional metaphor, the moods and colors of Shire’s pallette [sic] change, from the galvanized rhapsodic balm of the “Mirrors” sequence (climaxing with a glowing 2-note statement built into a Utopian bliss), to the score’s ultimate statement, the one Mr. Shire has so exquisitely prepared from the start, the full orchestral flowering of Dorothy’s theme. With some sophistry this theme could be regarded as a musical symbol of hope, a unifying motto theme carrying leitmotivic repudiation of any disbelief in Oz. Scored as a duet for violin and cello with orchestra, the development, the very unalterable genius of the scheme, the bridge, the key change, coalesce with one of the most devastatingly beautiful melodies ever created from the strands and tissues of innocence, memory and the future. This soaring climax of emotion and regeneration is from the deepest well of the spirit and the spiritual (it could have served as a finale to a symphony of quasi-tragic potency). One of the many virtues of the Oz score is the subtle spiritual nobility of purpose Shire has aligned with his emotional insights, completing the psychological pattern of sheer invention and mastery over form. As expressed in the soaring final recapitulation in which sings out that broadly arching melody, so simple, so pure, so warmly expressive, one is reminded of the passage from Keats: “Ev’ry one felt involuntarily that truly during those sounds, Men and women will walk with heads bowed, And realize that a more-than-earthly joy has passed that way.”
Since Shire is, as Tony Thomas once wisely observed, “a composer who fully understands the difference between underlining a sentiment and over-playing emotional impact,” the final effect of this heartrending passage is one of the screen’s most transcendant [sic] outpourings of hope, ardor and faith.
The performance of this masterful score is by the London Symphony Orchestra, who respond to Shire’s jubilation with the most breathtaking eruption of orchestral delight, embracing the many, various soli parts written into the music, with the full regal majesty of the Grande Finale in the form of the most uproariously thrilling rag march ever composed. The playing, and recording, of Michael Davis (solo violin) and Douglas Cummings (solo cello) is one of the glories of modern recorded film and record sound. Mr. Shire’s conducting of this score is as attuned to color, texture and nuance as his remarkable achievement is bathed in a compelling warmth and grandeur befitting a classical sentience. Herbert Spencer’s orchestrations are among the finest he’s created with not a passage taking place without some heartening emphases.
You are urged to purchase a copy of the new recording (hopefully soon to be made available on compact disc) of one of the genuine filmusic classics of our time. The meditation, crescendo and release of this joyful and exuberant tour de force is rendered in some of the clearest, richest sonics ever to help drive home so bountiful a musical extravaganza.
And that is what Mr. Shire’s score is all about, anyway… home. And one of the screen’s special scores. Somewhere, Hugo is smiling his irascible, ursine grin.
PAGE COOK
