Journey to the Center of the Earth
| Journey to the Center of the Earth | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Live album by Rick Wakeman | ||||
|
Publication |
May 3, 1974 |
|||
|
admission |
18th January 1974 |
|||
| Label (s) | A&M Records | |||
|
Format (s) |
LP, CD, music download |
|||
|
Title (number) |
4th |
|||
|
running time |
40 min 21 s |
|||
| occupation |
|
|||
|
Studio (s) |
Morgan Studios, London |
|||
|
Location (s) |
||||
|
||||
Journey to the Center of the Earth is the third album by British musician and keyboardist Rick Wakeman , released on May 3, 1974 on A&M Records . It is the live recording of the second of his two concerts in the Royal Festival Hall on January 18, 1974, the world premiere of his 40-minute orchestral rock epic based on Jules Verne 's science fiction novel The Journey to the Center of the Earth from 1864. It tells the story the story of Professor Lidinbrook, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans, who follow a passage to the center of the earth originally discovered by Arne Saknussemm, an Icelandic alchemist. Wakeman performs with the London Symphony Orchestra , the English Chamber Choir and a group of hand-picked musicians for his rock band, which later became the English Rock Ensemble . The accompanying narratives were voiced by British actor David Hemmings .
Track list
All titles are written by Rick Wakeman.
- The Journey / Recollection - 21:20
- The Battle / The Forest - 18:57
composition
The 40-minute piece is in four different sets divided: The Journey ( German : The Journey ), Recollection ( memories ), The Battle ( The Battle ) and The Forest ( The Forest ). All texts and the accompanying story were written by Wakeman himself, but he was not satisfied with his text composition. He confessed that his lyrics were "... really bad" for the first sentence , which prompted him to rewrite. The fourth movement, The Forest, contains quotations from In the Hall of the Mountain King from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt from 1876.
action
In a 12th-century manuscript called Heims Kringla , the chronicle of a Norwegian princess who ruled Iceland, the German professor Lidinbrook discovered a parchment written in runes . The document was deciphered into Latin and translated by Lidinbrook's nephew Axel. These were notes by the Icelandic alchemist Arne Saknussemm from the 16th century, in which he describes his journey to the center of the earth. The text also revealed the location of the entrance to the route in the extinct Snæfellsjökull volcano in Iceland . Together with their guide Hans, the two set out on a journey to follow in Saknussem's footsteps.
When entering the volcano you pass a lava gallery and come to a crossroads of two paths. Lidinbrook chooses the eastern tunnel, but after three days it had led the trio to a dead end. They return with only a daily supply of drinking water and eventually reached the intersection weak, tired, and thirsty. After a sleep they continued their journey when Hans heard the rush of flowing water behind a rock wall. He worked on the rock face with his pickaxe , whereupon a stream of boiling water pours out of it, which they call the Hansbach .
The three are temporarily separated and the lonely Axel becomes increasingly fearful. He thinks back to those he left home like his fiancée. Weeping, he runs through a tunnel, blind in the dark. He almost gives up, but suddenly he hears Lidinbrook's voice in the distance, calculates that he is only four miles from them, and sets off for the reunion. Suddenly the ground collapses under Axel and he finds himself with Lidinbrook and Hans in a forest of huge mushrooms near the cliffs and the sea.
The trio built a raft and set sail for a harbor they named Port Graub after Axel's fiancé. Five days after their departure, they witness a battle between an Ichthyosaurus and a Plesiosaurus . The Ichthyosaurus triumphs and the travelers are hit by a four-day storm and take shelter on some overhanging rocks. The storm had caused them to moor a few miles north of Port Graub in order to follow the original route from Saknussem overland. Across a plain strewn with bones, they enter a forest inhabited by giant mastodons led by a 12-foot-high Proteus . Stunned, the three flee from the forest into the Lidinbrookmeer and are washed into a dark tunnel that was dug deep into the rock and through which they blast a passage with dynamite . The explosion causes an earthquake , they find themselves in an active volcanic shaft, which throws them back to the surface of the earth on Etna in Sicily .
prehistory
By mid-1973, Wakeman had been with the progressive rock band Yes for almost two years and he had released his debut solo album The Six Wives of Henry VIII with great success. As a next project he wanted to put on an album that tells a story with its music. He was inspired by a performance of the symphonic fairy tale Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev , which he attended with his father , in which a narrator recited the story and an orchestra musically illustrated the plot. As early as November 1971, Wakeman was planning an orchestral rock piece based on the science fiction novel Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, published in 1864. He put this project on hold until he finished recording The Six Wives of Henry VIII . completed in October 1972 and collected some money and wrote music for it.
The project started in December 1972, when Wakeman took part in the orchestral concerts of the rock opera Tommy from The Who with the London Symphony Orchestra, the English Chamber Choir under conductor David Measham and directed under Wil Malone at the Rainbow Theater in London . Wakeman brought his idea to the show's producer Lou Reizner, who hooked him up with Measham to discuss further plans. Wakeman then produced a demo tape as a rough sketch of the overall structure of the music with a Minimoog synthesizer, Mellotron, Rhodes piano and clavinet, and presented it to Measham, stating where the orchestral parts should be placed. After Measham pledged support, Wakeman met with his manager Brian Lane to further develop the idea of performing the work with an orchestra, choir and a rock band. Since the cost of recording the album in a studio would be too high, his label A&M Records agreed to have the work recorded live in concert. To help fund the project, Wakeman sold several of his cars and "pledged himself to the limit " to cover the estimated cost of £ 40,000 .
After A&M Records gave the go-ahead to produce the album, Wakeman continued to work on the music until 1973, with assistance from Malone and Danny Beckerman for orchestral and choral arrangements. In a typical session, Malone developed chords and melody lines while Beckerman worked the parts into a score, which took several hours. It was Malone's first attempt to write for a symphony orchestra as he had not received any classical training. The original score was set to 55 minutes, but was reduced to 40 minutes in order to adapt it to the temporal possibilities of an LP. Malone called the project a challenge and "completely different" from what he had previously dealt with. A&M Records asked for a group of well-known musicians to be selected to play in their rock band. Wakeman declined because he wanted to inspire audiences with music rather than well-known performers. He chose a group he used to play with at the Valiant Trooper, a pub in Holmer Green , Buckinghamshire . "I'd played with them quite often on Sunday nights for fun ... I played keyboard with the guys so I thought they could play Journey for me." He chose vocalist Ashley Holt and drummer Barney James from Warhorse , vocalist Gary Pickford-Hopkins from Wild Turkey, bassist Roger Newell and guitarist Mike Egan, who also played on The Six Wives of Henry VIII . The first bass player to be selected was Dave Wintour, also a member of Six Wives . Actor and singer Richard Harris was the first choice to tell the story but was not available, so Wakeman chose actor David Hemmings.
implementation
.jpg)
Concerts
The concerts and the album were first announced in October 1973. They were put on a tour break from Yes's Topographic Oceans tour . There were two sold out performances on Friday, January 18, 1974 at 6 and 8 p.m. in the Royal Festival Hall in London, each of which was attended by 3,000 guests. Rehearsals took place on the day of the performance at 9 a.m. at Farmyard Studios in Little Chalfont in the Chiltern District . Each of the two performances lasted an hour and forty minutes. The London Symphony Orchestra and the English Chamber Choir performed with Wakeman and his band under the direction of Measham. A screen was located above the stage , on which archive recordings of mountains and caves were initially to be shown, but 20th Century Fox granted permission to show excerpts from the adventure film of the same name, The Journey to the Center of the Earth from 1959, along with the music. The original plan was to have the concerts filmed for a possible video release, but this was not realized due to a lack of available budget.
The performances began with an excerpt from the 1st Symphony by Sergei Rachmaninoff , followed by the titles Catherine Parr , Catherine Howard and Anne Boleyn from the album The Six Wives of Henry VIII , mixed with comical interpretations of A Road to Ruin and Twelfth Street Rag with banjos , ballad singers, as well as accompanying film clips from Laurel and Hardy and other silent films . Wakeman thought this part was a catastrophe, as the films only arrived shortly before the first showing and he had to improvise on the piano without knowing the content of the film. Wakeman wanted to make the first half of the concert "musical and entertaining" in order to make the actual performance in the second half of the concert more pleasant for the audience. As an encore , the humorous piece The Pearl and Dean Piano Concerto , based on various television and film scores, was played. News reporter Chris Welch attended the performance and noted, "Several members of the choir could be seen jumping in the more rhythmic moments, and when Rick played a beautiful classical piano there was nods of approval from the ranks of the orchestra." Following the second A party was held at the performance, but Wakeman did not attend due to exhaustion. According to Welch, he was driven home asleep.
production
Wakeman had hoped to record both concerts and choose the best of the two, but the London Symphony Orchestra charged double the fee. He then made "the appalling decision to only include the second performance in the hope that there would not be too many mistakes". The performance was recorded in 16-channel technology by Ronnie Lane's Lyn Mobile Studio, which was set up in an Airstream trailer. First of all, the prelude, i.e. the first half of the second concert, was recorded to set up and test the equipment. This recording was only released in 2002 on the CD The Missing Half from Wakman's limited Treasure Chest Edition.
The recordings were produced by Wakeman and mixed by him together with sound engineer Paul Tregurtha from January 21 to 29, 1974 at Morgan Studios in London, where a number of problems were encountered. According to Wakeman, just before recording began, someone in the street accidentally disconnected the vocal microphone cord. So they amplified the vocals picked up by the other microphones. A snare drum and a microphone broke during the performance together, and Hemmings had, due to unscheduled tape change during his performance, record some scenes in speech Studio. On four tracks there was a complete mess between the orchestra and the band, so that an identical passage from a later sequence had to be inserted.
A&M Records originally planned to have the album produced quickly so that it could be released in February 1974. However, additional time was needed to repair the mishaps during the recording, and a lack of vinyl delayed the production of the records, so the release was postponed to early April. The management feared that because of the delays, black copies of the concert could be sold in the meantime . The later release also fitted better with Wakeman's plans, who had resumed touring with Yes during the production period. During this tour he heard numerous clips from the album production and turned down several of them. "I just didn't like" the tone and it was worth it to take a few extra days to get it right. Another delay resulted from a lack of paper, as the original album design consisted of a flip sleeve with an 8-page booklet and the designer refused to reduce the record cover to a simple standard sleeve .
publication
After the finished album arrived at A&M Records, management received it negatively and refused to release it. However, since Wakeman was under contract with A&M Records in the United States, a demo cassette was sent to Jerry Moss in California, who then agreed to release it.
The album was released on May 3, 1974 and was the first A&M Records album to top the UK Albums Chart for a week . It was listed on the US Billboard 200 charts for 27 weeks and reached number 3 for two weeks in July. Within six weeks, the album became a multi-million dollar sales success.
To mark the 25th anniversary of the album, Wakeman in 1999 published a sequel titled Return to the Center of the Earth ( German : return to the Center of the Earth ), in which a group adventurers attempted the expedition of Saknussemm the center of the earth consequences.
In 2002 Wakeman brought out the 8-CD compilation Treasure Chest , which contained the previously unreleased supporting act for the first half of the second concert at the Royal Festival Hall. The actual recordings were accidentally deleted, but an inadequate recording was later rediscovered on an incorrectly labeled tape, which was then digitally remastered . One CD contained Hemmings' narratives in five different dialects , from a recording session in the studio that arose when Wakeman and Hemmings had been drinking while mixing the album in the studio.
In May 2016, a Super Deluxe Edition Box Set with 3 CDs and DVD was released with newly remastered versions of the original album, live performances from 1974 and 1993 as well as a DVD-Audio with a quadrophonic surround sound mix and an audiophile Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab- Mixture.
reception
The album was received very differently by critics after its release. Some music critics saw it as a "... classical imitation ... really horrific" and as "brutal synthesizer overkill" . Others took it positively. A Sunday Times journalist who missed the concert at the Royal Festival Hall said the music on the record "... comes across as great ... an impressive work that only occasionally sinks into pretentiousness" . Melody Maker's music journalist Chris Welch found the album "... entertaining, fresh and disarmingly unpretentious ... This could be a score for a Hollywood musical - melodious, but with epic overtones" . Welch pays tribute to Wakeman's “familiarity with the story” and his “… careful attention to detail creates a warmth for the work that made it a resounding success as a concert performance” . In a retrospective review, Allmusic's Mike DeGange called the album "... one of the crowning achievements of progressive rock" and noted " ... interesting accumulations of orchestral and synthesized music . "
Wakeman received an Ivor Novello Award for the album and he was nominated for the best instrumental pop performance for the Grammy Awards . In September 1974 the album was awarded gold by the Recording Industry Association of America . A year later, it was awarded gold in Brazil. According to The Times , the album sold more than 14 million copies worldwide.
Contributors
According to the information in the booklet of the CD A&M Records MFCD 848.
Musician
- Rick Wakeman - 3 Mellotrone , 2 Minimoog synthesizer, grand piano , Hammond organ , Rhodes electric piano, Rocky Mount Instruments electric piano, Hohner Clavinet , honky-tonk piano
- Gary Pickford-Hopkins - vocals
- Ashley Holt - vocals
- Mike Egan - electric guitar
- Roger Newell - bass guitar
- Barney James - drums
- David Hemmings - narrative
- David Measham - conductor
- London Symphony Orchestra - orchestra
- English Chamber Choir - Choir
production
- Rick Wakeman - writer, producer, director
- Danny Beckerman - choir and orchestra arrangement
- Will Malone - choir and orchestra arrangement
- Pete Flanagan - sound engineer
- Keith Grant - production
- Lou Reizner - Production Coordinator
- Paul Tregurtha - sound engineer
- Michael Doud - Artistic Director
- Michael Wade - designer
- Chris Foster - photographer
- Nigel Messett - photographer
- Ken Randall - photographer
- Paul Wakefield - photographer
- Peter Waldman - photographer
- Mike Mann - photo retouching
New recording
According to the original album tour which was score the conductors in the archives of the management company MAM Records archived. After the company went bankrupt in the early 1980s, the whereabouts of the score were unknown and Wakeman turned down offers from promoters to perform further concerts because he was of the opinion that a reconstructed version of the score would not do justice to the quality of the original. However, in 2009, Wakeman received a box from Australia that sat in his garage for about five months before going through it. In it he found nothing that belonged to him, except for a copy of the original score, which had since suffered water damage. Within a year, the score was digitized and put together with the help of the conductor and arranger Guy Protheroe. From this score a new 54-minute studio re-recording of Journey to the Center of the Earth was produced, which also contains the 18 minutes of music that had been cut from the original LP version for technical reasons. The recordings took place from July to September 2012 together with the Orion Orchestra, the English Chamber Choir, Wakemans Rock Band and the English Rock Ensemble. [34] After Hemmings died in 2003, the story was performed by actor Peter Egan . The album, released on November 20, 2012, was delivered together with an exclusive special edition of Classic Rock Magazine, a reprint of the 1974 Royal Festival Hall concert program and a 132-page booklet. From April 24th to May 10th 2014, Wakeman will tour Great Britain with the new arrangement.
On the occasion of his 70th birthday and the 45th anniversary of the album, Wakeman performed the newly recorded version on July 13 and 14, 2019 in the Royal Festival Hall.
literature
- Rick Wakeman: "Journey To The Center Of The Earth" . A&M Records, London 1974 (English, PDF [accessed on May 12, 2020] program booklet for the 1974 concert).
Web links
- Reviews of Journey to the Center of the Earth on the Babyblauen Seiten
- Journey to the Center of the Earth at Allmusic (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g Rick Wakeman - Journey To The Center Of The Earth. In: Discogs. Retrieved May 13, 2020 (English, media data).
- ↑ a b c d e f Chris Welch: Rick Wakeman: Sentimental Journey. In: Melody Maker. January 19, 1974, accessed on May 13, 2020 (English, paid online offer).
- ↑ a b c d e Mike Collett-White: Wakeman reworks rock epic Journey to Center of Earth. In: Reuters. November 14, 2002, accessed May 13, 2020 .
- ↑ a b c d e Rick Wakeman: "Journey To The Center Of The Earth" . A&M Records, London 1974 (English, PDF [accessed on May 12, 2020] program booklet for the 1974 concert).
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Dan Wooding: Rick Wakeman: The Caped Crusader . Granada Publishing, 1978, ISBN 0-586-04853-7 , pp. 11-22 (English).
- ↑ a b Rick Wakeman: Say yes! of autobiography . Hodder & Stoughton, London 1996, ISBN 978-0-340-62151-6 , pp. 120-124 (English).
- ↑ a b c d e Rick Wakeman to Go Solo. (No longer available online.) In: Melody Maker. October 13, 1973, formerly in the original ; accessed on May 13, 2020 (English). ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )
- ↑ a b c Chris Welch: Rick Wakeman: Festival Hall London. In: Melody Maker. January 25, 1974, accessed on May 13, 2020 (English, paid online offer).
- ↑ a b c d e f Chris Welch: Rick Wakeman: British Groups Have Gone Over The Top. In: Melody Maker. April 13, 1974, accessed on May 13, 2020 (English, paid online offer).
- ↑ a b c d Rick Wakeman - The Missing Half. In: Discogs. Retrieved May 13, 2020 (English, media data).
- ↑ Wakeman LP Delay Stirts Pirate Fears. (No longer available online.) In: Billboard. February 23, 1974, formerly in the original ; accessed on May 14, 2020 (English). ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )
- ^ A b Charles Snider: The Strawberry Bricks Guide to Progressive Rock . Strawberry Bricks, 2008, ISBN 978-0-615-17566-9 , pp. 172 (English).
- ^ Music: Rock Goes to College . In: Time Magazine . September 23, 1974 (English).
- ↑ Rick Wakeman- Journey To The Center Of The Earth (A & M Records - 5,363,450). In: Discogs. Accessed on May 14, 2020 (English, media data).
- ^ Roy Shuker: Popular Music The Key Concepts . 2nd Edition. Routledge, New York 2005, ISBN 0-415-34769-6 , pp. 210 (English).
- ↑ Mike DeGange: Journey to the Center of the Earth. In: Allmusic. Retrieved May 12, 2020 (English).
- ^ Rick Wakeman, Journey To The Center Of The Earth, September 4, 1974. In: Recording Industry Association of America. Retrieved May 12, 2020 (English).
- ↑ Rick Wakeman, six wives and one hell of a party. In: The Times. May 1, 2009.
- ^ Gordon Barr: Return Journey as Rick Wakeman opens tour at Newcastle City Hall. In: ChrnicleLive. April 11, 2014, accessed May 14, 2020 .
- ↑ a b Rick Wakeman - Journey To The Center Of The Earth (CRP13-11-12). In: Discogs. Accessed on May 14, 2020 (English, media data).
- ^ Rick Live - Journey to the Center of the Earth UK. (No longer available online.) In: Rick Wakeman's Communication Center. 2014, formerly in the original ; accessed on May 14, 2020 (English). ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )
- ↑ "Journey Comes Home 2019. (No longer available online.) In: Rick Wakeman's Communication Center. March 11, 2019, formerly in the original ; accessed on May 14, 2020 (English). ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )