King of Kings

AMG Review of King of Kings

Bruce Eder
All Music Guide

Nicholas Ray's King of Kings has had a very long and circuitous saga as a soundtrack. The music, written by Miklos Rozsa, first appeared on a soundtrack LP in 1961, in a re-recorded version conducted by Rozsa in Italy, but that album represented only a fraction of the music from the movie. That record had disappeared from the catalog by the end of the 1960s, and the music from King of Kings fell by the wayside. In 1990, Sony Music Special Products released a soundtrack CD that was more than double the length of the original LP that incorporated large sections of the music from the actual film tracks themselves, all conducted by Rozsa. Then, in 2002, came the Rhino Records double-CD set that encompasses every note of music written and recorded for the movie, including material that was recorded but never used in the final edit of the film. Just as Rozsa recalled fearing in his autobiography A Double Life, the music from King of Kings stands very much in the shadow of William Wyler's Ben-Hur, which Rozsa also composed and which preceded Ray's movie by a year, and dealt with overlapping events and the very same setting. Apart from the music accompanying the Nativity scene, the material devoted to John the Baptist, and the accompaniment to Satan's temptation of Jesus (Rozsa's only effort at writing serial music), the score is generally less inventive than that of Ben-Hur (which was, in turn, in debt in a small way to Rozsa's much earlier score for Quo Vadis), but it still has merit, including rich lyricism and striking timbres throughout, vigorous tempos and bold, strong performances -- the restored sections of the score also impart a majesty and scope to the music that is missing from even the final cut of the movie. The remastering makes up for a multitude of sins inherent in the original LP, while the expansion of the contents fulfills the promise of the earlier Sony edition of this score.