Echoes of War: The Music of Blizzard Entertainment Legendary Edition

A love for Blizzard became the talk of the town long ago. It’s supported not only by people’s adoration including lasting and smoochy kisses but by a steady cash flow also. Though it may seem strange this love is mutual and Blizzard has long been feeding the masses with its perfect games and different accessories, viz., books, toys, music. It seems that nothing new could be invented here.

But it turns out that something still can be. A remote continent Australia, which is btw situated even further than Japan, is full of people who’re freaky to some extent. Into whose head did it come to gather an orchestra performing music from games? You’ll say: “Tommy Talariko’s and his co-workers” and be damn right. OK, and what about an orchestra performing game music within Australia? Nope, it’s not about aborigines (though we assume that they are somehow involved during the tours) but nevertheless we’ll be talking about Australians.

Eminence Symphony Orchestra does really specialize solely in game music. If formerly during the concerts the orchestra was only adapting and “screening” soundtracks, now these guys have formed a real music foundry. For example, a soundtrack to a recent Soul Calibur IV was created right from beginning to end by this very Eminence Symphony Orchestra. It would be reasonable to suppose that it’s a good idea to consolidate this success but the way Australians did it amazes. They made a symphonic tribute to all famous music from across Blizzard's gaming universe.

So as not to make our reader experience a cultural shock we’ll mention that it’s not their first collaborative work with Blizzard. Before that Eminence Symphony Orchestra performed an overture for video game Diablo III composed by Russell Brower, and if to look earlier it emerges that the long-standing ties of friendship (something like “Russell, you’re a great guy, I love Blizzard”) between the founder and concertmaster of Eminence Hiroaki Yura (Japanese are everywhere!) and Russell exist. No wonder that at some moment the platonic relationship was brought to a new level.

The soundtrack is comprised of 2 discs with nearly 90 minutes of music and features tracks from the all recent works including unreleased Starcraft: Ghost. I should say that it was the guys from Eminence who made the arrangements, i.e. Blizzard played just a psychological role – they watched in order to ensure that nobody would screw up. Of course, Russell appeared to be an ideal watcher, as he’s both an ideological and a natural leader of the audio-team of professionals at Blizzard. Despite his working on Wrath of the Lich King maestro managed to find time to fly to Australia and to be present at the recording sessions.

Eminence Symphony Orchestra is a fully-featured orchestra ready to accomplish tasks on any difficulty level. Unfortunately, the orchestra has a specific muffled and stifled sounding a bit blurring the sound. So in contrast to a crystal clear sound of a symphonic soundtrack to Fable II there’s a kinda sound squash here. Though it’s arguably the only one considerable shortcoming and also a subjective one.

The arrangements are very well-done and in fact they’re quite close to the original tracks – you’ll admit that it’s rather hard to reconsider an hour and a half of a high-quality music completely. Given the original symphonic style of Blizzard’s work professionals from Eminence only had to make a neat orchestration trying not to add a lot from themselves. They excellently coped with this task except perhaps for transcription of synth-rock compositions from Terran for the orchestra, which turned out to be a bit strange – a replacement of a synth with a trumpet is not quite suitable and a primitive rhythm played on drums is far from a driving performance and more likely to be wrenched out of its context. It’s unclear what prevented them from making just an arrangement leaving the original electronic music in the track.

As for the rest it’s highly professional work, which passed a quality test from Blizzard for a certain reason. The album contains all the gems of the three gaming universe - WoW, Diablo and Starcraft including the famous Tristram theme. Unfortunately, it’s not performed by Matt Uelmen and the rhythm was slower than the original – either it was the authors’ idea or Zane Banks just couldn’t play a piece at the original tempo.

And finally I’d like to draw your attention to a track composed by the author of soundtracks to the game series Tales of, Go Shiina. His composition Eradicate and Evolve is a rethought Starcraft Zerg Theme with vocal and surprise! electronic insertions. Perhaps, it’s the only one track with a touch of synthetics on this album.