Because of a newfound interest with the music of John Williams (and the flurry of research that has sparked) I decided to take on the project of reconstructing a sort of aural facsimile of the 1977 Zubin Mehta concert. ALL of it.

I emphasize ALL of it because much of the concert (the parts by the L.A. Philharmonic) has been released on CD recently, including Mehta’s 1978 recording of the original Star Wars suite. However, not only does this leave a good third of the concert out, but it also may be incomplete (or have a few erroneous inclusions). As I know it, there are three existing recordings of the 4th movement “The Battle”; the original by Zubin Mehta, the 1978 Charles Gerhardt recording, and a rather muddy one by Richard Hayman which appeared on a Naxos USA CD (I believe this was on GoodMusician’s complete score set). In terms of sonic quality, the Mehta version wins hands down, but there may in fact be a missing section.

In both the Gerhardt and the Hayman recordings, most of the trench run score is in place, so the transition to the final part is a little more graceful. On Mehta, however, there is a large section which doesn’t appear. What’s missing is right after the section adapted from “X-Wings Draw Fire”, which on the Mehta recording jumps right to the track “Use the Force” (where all official DVDs cut in for that chapter, the part that plays as C-3PO worries for R2). I do know that Gerhardt often took liberties with the composition of his suites, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the reason for this (especially since “Here They Come!” didn’t exist until him but has become a necessary part of most Star Wars suite recordings).

There is also the issue of the first movement.

I am going by this program: [img]http://i.imgur.com/vLzcmZP.jpg[/img]

It went on eBay a while back, and since I wasn’t able to snag it, I just decided to save the photos. I only have one track for this early section; William Shatner’s spoken word of “War of the Worlds”. Everything else is a total mystery to me. According to this, Gil Mellé was in attendance, and while I can find a wealth of information about him, the pieces he’s claimed to have played (“In the Year of the Comet”, “The Interplanetary Suite”, and “Spacetta”) do not seem to exist according to the WWW. Additionally, it seems I hit a serious bit of luck with discovering Shatner’s reading of “War of the Worlds” since a reading by him of “Whales Weep Not” seems to not exist either (even though I’ve found interviews of him discussing the damn thing!).

If there is anyone out there who would happen to have the answers to a few of these questions, I would be most gracious! The final tracklist would (hopefully) be (with currently available pieces * and incomplete pieces **):

William Shatner, “War of the Worlds - Excerpt”** (in process of denoising and removing some crowd noise)
William Shatner, “Whales Weep Not”
Gil Mellé, “In the Year of the Comet”
Gil Mellé, “The Interplanetary Suite”
Gil Mellé, “Spacetta”
Richard Strauss, “Thus Sprach Zarathustra” Opening*
Gustav Holst, “Mars, the Bringer of War”*
Gustav Holst, “Venus, the Bringer of Peace”*
Gustav Holst, “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity”*
Gustav Holst, “Neptune, the Mystic”*
John Williams, “Main Titles”*
John Williams, “Princess Leia’s Theme”*
John Williams, “The Little People”*
John Williams, “The Battle”** (currently trying to decide the original track’s editing)
John Williams, “Throne Room and End Title”*