Thorn Birds
The 10th anniversary of American film and television scoring titan Henry Mancini's passing was marked by the US Postal Service issuing a commemorative stamp in  conjunction with a gala tribute concert hosted by Julie Andrews and astronaut-senator John Glenn. But for Mancini buffs, this previously unreleased double-disc  soundtrack for the massively successful 1983 ABC-TV miniseries (second in viewership only toRoots) will seem a more gratifying tribute to the American  pop music icon's enduring legacy. Novelist Colleen McCullough's grand soap opera about a priest caught up in a forbidden  Australian outback-rooted romance  eventually sprawls over five decades and half the globe, but Mancini skillfully keeps its emotional core focused via some of the most subtly romantic and elegantly  understated writing of his career. His sublime melodic gifts yield the memorable Drogheda and Maggie themes, the former's portrayal of the vast Australian  wilderness ingeniously carried at first by but a lone dulcimer, while the latter perfectly underpins the story's budding romance with tinges of bittersweet melancholy.-- Jerry McCulley