Album Review: THE SOUND OF MUSIC SUPER DELUXE EDITION A Must Have For Die Hards

Well the Sound Of Music fans of the world sure got the holiday gift they wanted in 2023.  Craft Recordings/The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization have released a set of recordings called The Sound of Music (Original Soundtrack Recording) (Super Deluxe Edition) that is more material from the soundtrack of the beloved film than has ever been available to the public.  Of course, the rejoicing over this release will be based, entirely, on how much of a fan a person is… because this is a lot of material, a lot of material that comes with a lot of price.  Depending on what you are ordering, you will be spending as much as $109.00 for the biggest presentation (a smaller CD set is $25 and the Vinyl is $75).  That’s a lot of money to pay if you’re just a C-level fan, or maybe even a B-level fan.  If you’re not top-tier dedicated to the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic about nuns, Nazis, alps, children, music, and all of your other favorite things, you may be perfectly satisfied with the recording you already have in your home collection.  But if you are a die-hard SOM fan who watches the movie more than once a year, goes to see Sing-A-Long Sound Of Music when it’s in town, and can recite Baroness Schraeder’s wiener schnitzel and yachts speech in real time as Eleanor Parker is delivering it, then this is the holiday gift for you.

The fine folks at Craft have released this project on Blu-Ray/CD, on regular CD, and on Vinyl, spreading the materials out over multiple discs.  On those discs, they are offering the original soundtrack that we all grew up with, a new soundtrack that includes every single note of music heard in the movie, radio interviews from the time the film was being made and released, demos, original vocals, alternate cuts, and tracks from the soundtrack with the voices removed (think better, higher quality karaoke tracks played by Irwin Kostal).  It’s a wealth of material that true blue fans will worship.  And although some might think it’s overkill to release the original soundtrack with this set, it’s nice to have it all contained in one place so you don’t have to go digging around for other CDs or albums bought years ago.  You might be able to give the older ones away, save space, and make this set your Sound Of Music go-to.  There will be days when you do just want to listen to the soundtrack as you heard it, all the years of your life before now.  But on the days that you want a longer, more enriched musical journey, all those instrumental cuts that play under the dialogue will give you a chance to enjoy the music for itself.  Both of those discs are fine, and beautiful and ready to be enjoyed.  But the meat of the recording lies in the additional materials.

First off, there are the interviews.  They aren’t very long, so they won’t require a big time investment, but they are fun to hear, especially the ones with Richard Rodgers, where he discusses the making of the movie and his artistic process.  Robert Wise has some light to shed on his experience directing the picture, and Charmian Carr is very pleasant and unassuming in her talk with Dick Stroud (Stroud does all the interviews).  Then there are the alternate tracks - ten of them, and they really are alternate tracks.  In my research for this review I was looking up the specs of the product and the price, and I saw several customer reviews on Amazon declaring that there is repeat material in this set.  That is absolutely not what I experienced.  Mind you, I am working off of Spotify, not the product itself (requests for reviewer copies were not answered), but going track-by-track on Spotify, I got exactly what is reported online:  The new soundtrack with all the incidental music from the movie, the original soundtrack that was previously released (to that end, yes, there is repeat material but there is no false advertising, whatsoever), the interviews, the instrumental tracks, and the demo/alternate tracks.  And it is the demo and alternate tracks that made this lifelong (since the age of six) Sound of Music devotee cry.  Hearing Christopher Plummer’s cut recordings is, alone, worth exploring this set.  His singing performance is so lovely and pure that you can’t help but wonder why they had him dubbed by Bill Lee (who has always sounded dreamy, but Christopher Plummer, you know?).  And even though the alternate recordings of “I Have Confidence,” “My Favorite Things” and other songs are extremely close to what we all know - they really are alternate tracks, which die hards like me will recognize - and that’s the kind of stuff we die hards want, isn’t it?  And one of the biggest treats here is the “I Have Confidence” demo by Marni Nixon.  People in the know will remember that Marni Nixon wasn’t just the iconic ghost voice we hear from the leading ladies when we watch the movies My Fair Lady, The King and I, and West Side Story, she was also one of the nuns in  the movie of The Sound of Music.  Hearing that unmistakable voice (The voice of Eliza Doolittle and Mrs. Anna!) sing even just one song from this musical will make you smile so big that you're beaming.  It is just glorious.  For the Top Shelf fans, it really is a must-have, especially when you consider the packaging - which I cannot write about because, again, I am reviewing off of Spotify, and not the product.  However, if you look at the YouTube video you can see that the physical product comes with a lot of liner notes, photos, and A&R, which is probably why it retails so high.  I’m not going to mind spending the money to add this to my collection because when I was a girl we had the record album, which had a booklet that slipped into the duo-fold record jacket.  I loved flipping through that booklet as a kid, even if I wasn't playing the record album, and I’m going to love flipping through all sixty-four pages of the booklet here (according to online research).

So, if you’re a huge SOM fan like me, you probably want to check out this special edition - it might make a nice holiday present to ask a loved one to give you, or for you to give a loved one... or for you to give yourself.  But, like I said above, if you’re not a charter member of the club, you may just want to skip the packaging, the photos, and the trivia, and just go straight to Spotify.  It’s a personal choice that each fan will make on their own, and there are lots of options available.  This girl’s going all the way.

 Get information on all the different versions of this set on the Craft Recordings website HERE or check out the Amazon link in this article.

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