Between 1958 and 1963 Bernard Herrmann scored four of Ray Harryhausen's classic live-action animated fantasy films, including a version of Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (1961). Two years before, he wrote the music for this lavish 20th Century-Fox Verne adaptation, Journey To The Center Of The Earth, a CinemaScope spectacular staring James Mason. There are desperate chases, terrifying dinosaurs, a "Whirlpool" an "Earthquake" and a climactic volcanic eruption; in effect the film is an early example of the modern special-effects blockbuster. Clearly inspired by this expensively produced fantasy, Herrmann wrote music of cavernous brilliance and unearthly grandeur, orchestrated with startling depth and imagination. He employs massed organs and multiple harps to establish textures which are ethereal, delicate, brooding and luminously strange, adding an extended woodwind section, menacing percussion and the medieval instrument, the serpent, to evoke the deadly creatures and geological perils of an inhuman world deep within the earth. Unconventional, beautiful, heroic, explosive and savagely violent, this breathtaking adventure score is visionary film music by a master of the craft. The stereo sound is excellent, and as a bonus the album also contains three songs by the film's co-star, Pat Boone. Resolutely middle-of-the-road, they are somewhat incongruous besides Herrmann's uncompromising and brilliant sonic odyssey. --Gary S. Dalkin