Original released on CD
TCM Turner Classic Movies Music 8122 71957-2
Rhino Movie Music – R2 71957
(US 1995, April 25 - recorded 1965)
The M-G-M Studio Orchestra, compositor y director - Morris Zharr
"Doctor Zhivago" is a lively and vibrant work from the brilliant young French composer Maurice Jarre. Already heralded for his acclaimed scores in the films "The Longest Day", "The Collector", and "Lawrence of Arabia", Jarre put together a bold and expressive score in spirited fashion. The music for "Doctor Zhivago" includes Russian folk tunes, bits from Soviet marches, songs, ballads, and dances. Featured in this work is the lovely and haunting "Lara's Theme," as well as themes noting the violence and terror of the revolution. With a chilling sense of detail, scope, and experimentation, Jarre proves to be successful at capturing the essence of the film's main character, Doctor Zhivago, featured earlier in the book by Boris Pasternak, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The album was put together using an orchestra unprecedented in its size and scope at the time. Jarre conducted the orchestra himself for ten days, using the full 110-piece group assembled in Hollywood for the occasion. Also featured was a unique group of 24 balalaika musicians and Japanese instrumentalists; koto, gong, organ, Novachord, electric sonovox, harpsichord, electric and tack pianos, and zither were included in the ensemble. The music was accompanied by 40 voices. Leo Arnaud, Lou Raderman, and Monique Rollin each worked closely with Jarre during the recording of this film masterpiece. The music itself is fresh, unique, and daring, performed by the orchestra with enthusiasm and a remarkable sense of energy and flair. (Shawn Haney in AllMusic)
Maurice Jarre wrote the central musical motif of his score for "Doctor Zhivago", "Lara's Theme," in a few minutes in a hotel, amid a frantic five-week rush to score the 197-minute movie. That theme made the "Doctor Zhivago" soundtrack album one of the biggest selling soundtrack of the 1960s, a considerable feat when one reckons in the competition from "A Hard Day's Night", "Never on Sunday", "A Man and a Woman", "Exodus", and "2001: A Space Odyssey". The rest of Jarre's score is more in the realm of lushly textured Russian-themed mood music, filled with dark male choruses, folk and folk-like themes, and dense orchestrations, sort of faux-Tchaikovsky. The stereo separation is used to good effect, and the music as a whole forms a kind of romantic/exotic travelogue as much as a dramatic sketch of the movie's action. The only drawback is that, given the length of the movie and the relatively short time that Jarre had to compose and record the score, there is a fair amount of repetition (one wishes that Jarre had been as lucky as Miklos Rozsa on "Ben-Hur", with nearly a year to work on the music for that epic). The Sony CD was a considerable upgrade over the MGM LP and the mid-'80s MCA CD in both sound and content, adding a large body of incidental and intermission music built on the main themes from the film as well as several variants on "Lara's Theme." It, in turn, was supplanted by this Rhino Records' 1995 re-release, which offered somewhat better sound quality and more than a half-dozen outtakes from the score. (Bruce Eder in AllMusic)
