Vangelis: Mythodea - Music for the NASA Mission: 2001 Mars Odyssey

Superstar Greek composer Vangelis was one of the pioneers of popular electronic music, taking the synthesiser-driven composition out of the classical arena and straight onto top 40 radio with his ubiquitous theme for the movie Chariots of Fire and a hit album with Yes’ Jon Anderson. Though Vangelis has kept composing film scores and releasing records in the years since he became a household name, it’s likely he’ll always be remembered as the guy that did the definitive soundtrack to a bunch of guys running in slow motion down a cold beach.

But don’t make the mistake of pegging Vangelis as easy listening’s poster boy. Always searching for new ways to integrate electronics with larger-scale musical works, he recorded and staged, back in 2001, an epic work that placed his keyboards in the midst of a large-scale orchestra with a huge choir, a percussion ensemble or two and a pair of big-box-office sopranos; the reason for this gargantuan gathering was Mythodea, a big, big work that makes Carl Orff’s entire career sound like a subway busker playing Pink Floyd by comparison. Going by the accompanying featurette, it’s a work that was pretty much composed before NASA got involved and suggested a connection to the 2001 Mars mission; by the time of its premiere, it had become “about the connection between the ancient Greeks and space travel�. Which basically means there are lengthy passages that sound like Holst’s The Planets bookending what essentially amounts to a full-throttle operetta done with gusto, while daggy imagery is projected onto a screen behind the players.

Throughout, the influences are easy to spot - and aside from Holst, Orff’s Carmina Burana is a likely prototype - but if it’s spectacle you’re after, that’s exactly what Vangelis delivers from start to finish, and it’s performed with gusto by all involved. Too much gusto, sometimes - it’s hard to suppress a giggle at several points, as superstar sopranos Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle set new standards for over-emoting…!

And to be fair, it’s all great fun - though all involved seem to be taking it so intensely seriously that you could be forgiven for thinking the word “fun� was something only the audience were in on, as they exuberantly applaud absolutely everything - often bursting into applause and cheers before the last note of a movement (there are ten) has died away. And why not? After all, they’re in a massive outdoor setting having aural Armageddon thrown at them with not-so-subtle cues from the relatively recent history of over-the-top classical music cleverly interwoven. This live performance, held at the undeniably picturesque Temple of Zeus in Athens, pulls out all the stops to make sure the audience get the grand tour of orchestral and choral colour in the 70-odd minutes the piece takes to unfold.

And then Vangelis goes and spoils it all when, triumphantly returning to the stage for a bow, he plays The Hit Single. Though it may indeed be bigger with an orchestra helping out, the Chariots of Fire theme sounds, thanks to its familiarity and its easy-listening nature, like very expensive elevator music. People love this piece, of course. But its place isn’t here.

Another fairly disappointing Sony Music release video-wise, this one was authored a year ago in February 2002, when the PAL efforts coming from the company were of an occasionally problematic standard (they’ve since improved markedly). The main problem here is that the production was quite obviously shot on 16:9 PAL video, but has been equally obviously prepared from an analogue master tape, one which appears to have gone through a couple of generations of some kind of conversion (our guess would be that this DVD was prepared from an NTSC-converted master). What’s presented here is the 16:9 image letterboxed in a 4:3 (non-anamorphic) frame, and while colour saturation is excellent and detail acceptable, there’s a definite softness and “haze� to the image which, along with some mild video noise, occasionally plays havoc with the somewhat sub-standard MPEG encoding used here.

A 16:9 anamorphic PAL digital master tape surely exists, and you would think it could have been sourced for this release. As it stands, the picture quality is merely adequate.

Two audio tracks are offered here: Linear PCM 16/48 stereo and a Dolby Digital 5.1 surround version. The surround mixing is fairly innocuous - the rears see little use aside from audience participation and incredibly subtle ambience, while the centre channel is barely utilised at all. But we’d recommend the 5.1 track over the PCM, even for those listening in headphones or on stereo speakers. The PCM track appears to have been mastered with an unnatural bias towards the right channel, and also seems to lack some of the warmth of the 5.1 mix (and those with subwoofers will appreciate the LFE channel during some of this piece’s more dramatic moments, too). The audio rating is for the Dolby Digital 5.1 track.

There's not much in the way of extras here, but more than you’d expect from such a release. The DVD, like an increasing amount of Sony Music titles, is encoded with DVD Text and a jacket picture for players that support these features (not surprisingly, Sony players do!)

Propaganda: When you hit “play� for the first time you’ll have an ad inflicted upon you, exhorting you to buy the audio CD of the show. It’s extremely tacky that it’s here at all, but it’s only 20 seconds long and skippable. There’s also a tedious intro from a NASA man reading an autocue as though it were a systems checklist.

Essays: Three text-screen-based short essays, by NASA’s Dr Jim Garvin (on the 2001 mission), author Laurence Bergreen (on the fascination with Mars) and Vangelis himself.

Making-Of: A sporadically interesting 20-minute promo featurette focussing on the sheer size of the production. Extremely unpolished.

Music Video: A promotional clip edited from the full program. A bit pointless given that the full program is what you just bought.

Artist Biographies: Vangelis, Jessye Norman and Kathleen Battle text bios.

If you like your music big, they don’t come much bigger than this while still being accessible to the masses (if the latter isn’t a requirement for you, though, you’d be much better off with Mahler!). Well directed and recorded, though technically flawed on DVD, Mythodea is still a disc that Vangelis’ many fans will undoubtedly already be treasuring their copy of.