Studs Lonigan (1960) was Jerry Goldsmith’s fourth film score, and what a score it is! It is a stunning work which offers an early glimpse of many musical ideas which, over the coming decades, would manifest themselves into many of Goldsmith’s greatest and most famous scores. One remarkable aspect of Jerry Goldsmith’s career and music is how mature even his earliest scores were. Studs Lonigan is not a Goldsmith footnote, but instead proves to be a genuinely great Goldsmith score, representing a freshness and originality as well as a level of accomplishment and experience that belie its early origin. It’s a spirited, even rambunctious score, full of melody but with cues featuring powerfully dramatic writing as well. Goldsmith, who was 30 at the time, also composed virtuoso piano solos that are performed here by a then-27-year-old John Williams! Over 40 years after it was composed, this release of Studs Lonigan, which now becomes the oldest film score of Goldsmith’s to have ever been released, remedies an important missing chapter in the composer’s discography. After hearing it, it is not difficult to understand why its long-overdue release was something about which even the composer himself was excited. For both its historical importance and as a score divorced from any such significance, standing solely on its own musical merit, Studs Lonigan is perhaps the single most essential soundtrack of Goldsmith’s least known scores.