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Against Their Favourites, What Are Your Favorites?

Janos Gereben on October 1, 2013

BBC Radio 3 has conducted a national audience poll about "favourite soundtracks" and John Williams' Star Wars main theme came in at number one.

BBC soundtracks
Music Lovers No.1

It topped a list that spans 64 years of cinema soundtrack history. The soundtrack secured Williams him his third Academy Award in 1977. He announced he will return to compose the score to the forthcoming Star Wars: Episode VII film, which is due for release in 2015.

No. 2 was Ennio Morricone’s The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, followed by Leonard Bernstein's score for West Side Story.

Surprisingly, Bernard Hermann’s renowned soundtrack to Hitchcock’s Psycho missed out on the top 10 to another classic Hitchcock soundtrack, Vertigo. Wagner (Richard) came in No. 10, with his posthumous soundtrack for Apocalypse Now. (Yes, that's both true and funny.) And check out No. 14 for Swan Lake.

1. Star Wars (Williams)
2. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Morricone)
3. West Side Story (Bernstein)
4. Lawrence of Arabia (Jarre)
5. Vertigo (Herrmann)
6. The Third Man (Karas)
7. Dark Knight Rises (Zimmer)
8. Grease (various)
9. The Sound of Music (Rogers & Hammerstein)
10. Apocalypse Now (Wagner)
11. Psycho (Herrmann)
12. Django Unchained (Bacalov/Morricone)
13. Mary Poppins (Sherman Brothers)
14. Billy Elliot (Tchaikovsky)
15. The Wizard Of Oz (Harold Arlen, EY Harburg, Herbert Stothard)
16. There Will Be Blood (Greenwood)
17. Planet Of The Apes (Jerry Goldsmith)
18. 8 ½ ‘Otto e Mezzo’ (Rota)
19. Sholay (Burman)
20. Bombay (Rahman)