Recent Soundtrack Releases
David Aspinall
Bicentennial
Man
James Horner
conducted by the composer
Sony
SK 89038 
In Bicentennial Man we encounter Horner in his sleepy
Cocoon mode. Now sleepy mode is a rather pleasant
place to be, but you don't want to stay long. Ten minutes is
nice, but after that I want to either to go to sleep or get up
and stop wasting time. I gather that the plot of this film
involves a robot (Robin Williams) who wants to be a man
(hu-man, that is, not merely a male person). If it sounds Pinocchio-esque,
one could at least wish upon a star that Horner's creation
might have displayed as much vivacity and vitality as the
Leigh Harline/Paul Smith score for the Disney classic. Alas,
though there is much pretty tinkling piano and thrummed harp
and an abundance of feel-good chords from string section and
synths, Horner's efforts are, to analogize along the subject's
line, robotic. Cynics have rightly observed that our
technological society, with its planned obsolescence, is
designed to serve less than altruistic ends. The cynic in me
(and the conspiracy theorist who's in there with him) would
suggest that this Hollywood generation, whether serving up
mechanical excitements (Independence Day, Armageddon)
or assembly-line humanism like Bicentennial Man, is
feeding us placebo populism, stimulants and/or sedatives --
our choice of drug. Didn't Huxley predict that this would be
the ultimate tyranny -- planned somnolescence?
The End of the Affair
Micheal Nyman
conducted by the composer
Sony SK 51534
A human being is a mist appearing
for a little while. An amoeba lives forever. A man moves, both
in body and, more significantly, in his imagination. An oak
stands ten times as tall as a man but remains in one place. Who
would rather be an amoeba or an oak than a human being? These
unmusical reflections are forced upon one in trying to account
for the popularity of Michael Nyman's oeuvre. I am at a loss to
explain the success of Nyman, Glass, etc., on purely aesthetic
grounds. Unlike the amoeba, Nyman won't live forever. But his
aesthetic is similar -minimal motility and energy expended,
maximal offspring. There seems to be some correlation between
the success of minimalism and our (much) reduced attention span.
Read a Victorian author - any Victorian author - and you'll
quickly notice that the cultured reader is expected to follow a
complex sentence through (sometimes tortured convolutions) to a
logical conclusion, which is often removed from its beginning by
several dozen words. Few of us have the patience for this type
of English any more. Is this progress? Or have our sensoria been
conditioned, by two generations of ever-shortening sound and
video bytes, to new stimulae every few seconds? So that while
Brahms is too hard work for almost any of us - we'd have to be
able to follow an idea for longer than the length of the average
commercial - Nyman with his slightly-varied repetitions is about
as much of a stretch as the modern listener can handle. For
those accustomed to this aesthetic, Brahms must be like watching
four or five television programs at once. Who wouldn't prefer
the millennial equivalent of Lawrence Welk?Except that we used to be able to handle Brahms. Forty years of listening to Beethoven had made Brahms accessible, even inevitable. Another forty years of Brahms made Berg (if not Schoenberg) accessible. I fear that those conditioned by Nyman and Glass will not likely ever be able to "get" Newman and Herrmann, let alone Brahms and Berg.
To the music (finally and briefly!): minimal movement tending to stasis, minimum contrast in dynamics and timbre (mostly strings, unlike, to be fair, some Nyman scores), tending to anaesthetize the listener. Summary: maximum boredom.
The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
Eric Serra
London Session Orchestra, Metro Voices, Eric Serra cond.
Sony SK 66537
I haven't seen The Messenger
and after hearing the score, the inclination is even less than
it was. While Serra's score is by no means as monotonous as most
generic film music, it translates the story of Joan of Arc into
music in a way that would indicate her "voices" were
visitors from intergalactic space, not the supernal realm.
Piling in influences willy nilly (Nyman, Morricone, Williams,
Herrmann - the Harryhausen scores, and the omnipresent Orff)
with a heavy dose of electronics. Most of it is from the
music-as-sound-effects school, and, like most of that genre,
manages to manufacture mystery but not music. And at the end,
just when you thought it was safe to go to sleep, a bromide
titled My Heart Calling, of which nothing more need be
said than that it sounds like a Celine Dion reject. As my wife
Vivian asked upon catching its immortal lyric, "You mean it
took TWO people to write this?" The Classic Film Music of Georges Auric, Vol 2
Orphee; Les Parents Terribles; Thomas l'Imposteur; Ruy Blas
Slovak Radio Symphony (Bratislava), Adriano cond.
Marco Polo 8.225066
We
greeted the
previous
Adriano/Auric release with much enthusiasm. La Belle
et La Bete, with its amalgam of Ravel, Fauré and
multifarious pleasant influences, was a CD well worth sampling.
This set of suites from Cocteau collaborations I'm still not
sure about. Perhaps it's Adriano's four-square conducting. I'm
not crazy about his Honegger CDs either, and the performances
may have at least as much to do with that as the music.
Whatever, nothing here excites me after a handful of hearings.
Mostly meandering, formula stuff, obviously written as
accompaniment. Not without Auric's water colour skills
(especially the Imposteur baroquery). I suppose the sum is that
Auric's film music, while often lovely, has not the character
nor feeling to elevate it beyond the distinctive, unto the
distinguished. A suitable comparison: compare Auric's
swashbuckling Ruy Blas to anything in this genre by
Korngold, or to Steiner's Adventures of Don Juan,
written about the same time (1947). Auric is skilled, various in
his themes and orchestration, a not unpleasant diversion, BUT
.... . What's missing is power, passion. Artisanship in
abundance, but not alive. A simulacrum of art, but, lacking the
vital spark, finally not life.