Overview

In the year between the 2002 release of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and the 2004 release of its sequel, EA was left without a Potterverse game for 2003. In order to keep one of its premier licenses in the black, Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup was developed and released that year, allowing players to take to the skies astride brooms and participate in the bizarre wizard sport. Jeremy Soule, who had penned scores to the previous two Potterverse games, was retained to write the music.

Body

Soule doesn't retain any thematic elements from his previous scores, and stylistically only the most rambunctious flying cues from Sorceror's Stone or Chamber of Secrets can compare with the bombast that's unleashed here. Aiming for a straightforward action score, Soule keeps a light tone but doesn't include much in the way of magic. Interestingly, the Quidditch World Cup score features a deeper and more overtly John Williams-esque sound than the previous two games, something that would be carried over into Soule's Prisoner of Azkaban music the next year.

The album features gigantic action cues as its centerpieces, with the five-minute "The Magic Match" and seven-minute "International Match" each running through furious sections of bombastic orchestral music. Making up a third of the album's running time, these stracks are clear highlights, and feature some of Soule's most well-developed and lengthy ideas for any project. In fact, the chaotic complexity of the music can be overwhelming at times, and save a few momentary interludes, each six-minute bloc is all action all the time. "Field Match" is an exception; its summery Celtic atmosphere and harp arpeggios are another highlight.

Fanfares for the various competitors make up the rest of the music. Weighing in at around a minute each, they offer sounds consistent with the ethnicity of the teams; lively Slavic music for the Bulgarians, didgeridoo accents for the Australians, and so on. The French, English and Nordic themes match the lively sound of the match music, with the USA presenting a mix of Sousa and Copeland. While these pieces are a little underdeveloped due to their length, the music nevertheless works.

In 2006, during the hiatus before Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix hit store shelves, EA released iTunes album versions of all the Jeremy Soule Potter music, including Quidditch World Cup. The album version clocks in at around 30 minutes, missing some music, but far more complete than any of the other 2006 EA albums. Unfortunately, the slipshod production that plagued these releases is very much evident, and is in fact somewhat worse here: several tracks feature broken fadeouts, in which the music suddenly drops to a lower volume and a few seconds later drops again rather than a smooth transition. Unlike the lack of looping or trailing silence in the other albums, this defect can't be corrected by audio editing, since most of the affected tracks are fanfares that do not loop.

Summary

Quidditch World Cup is the most complete yet arguably most frustrating Soule Potterverse album. The music is uniformly excellent, if lacking in magic, but the shoddy production nearly ruins it. Ultimately, fans might be better off purchasing the three match themes, which are error-free and also represent the best of the game's music (and, at 16 minutes, more than half the album).