Listening: physical album (w/music info), iTunes/Apple Music, Amazon
Info
Alright we finally made it to the second arranged album, good for us! This album takes the motifs for the six(?) main areas as featured in their stage, overworld, and battle themes, and arranges them for plenty of guitar, winds, and violin. All the tracks are marked as being arranged by their original composers, although who exactly composed the original country motifs is a bit sketchy to me because the original soundtrack credits different people on different tracks sometimes. Also this album omits Mitsuhiro Kaneda from track 6 despite “Isle of Palevia” definitely being his. Well anyway.
The original themes are always obvious in these arrangements, but they definitely take more liberties than the 16-bit arranged album did, not just in the instrumentation but also in the structure. Generally the arrangements start off stating the original theme fairly straightforwardly like “what if the original piece was actually folk music,” and then after a minute or two they depart to take the original material in a different direction or maybe just solo for a bit. Of these, I liked Mitsuhiro Kaneda’s arrangements way more than the others because his pieces had more active individual partwriting; there’s pretty much always a countermelody going on, giving his arrangements a bit more of a chamber music feel than the others.
This album also includes two orchestral arrangements which were featured as bonus pieces performed at the 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim concert held in February. Maybe a little tonally weird to add them at the end here, but an orchestra is an acoustic ensemble, so it’s not technically incorrect I guess. They’re fine.
Recommended tracks:
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“Cornia -Gentle Breeze-” (Mitsuhiro Kaneda) has some very pretty violin countermelodic writing going on from about 45 seconds in to pretty much the end of the piece nonstop
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“Drakenhold -Rugged Mountain Range-” (Yoshimi Kudo) busts out a pretty sick acoustic guitar solo halfway through (no performer is credited, so this may be Kudo himself)
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“Main Theme” (Kaneda) was the orchestra piece I liked more, using “Alain’s Theme” as a somber intro to give the whole thing a bit more of an arc to it
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