CD Review: THE FILM & TV MUSIC OF CHRISTOPHER GUNNING

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 02/09/2011
The Film & TV Music of Christopher Gunning. Soundtrack | ©2010 Chandos Records

In his four-decade and counting career, Christopher Gunning has been a stalwart of the English scoring scene with a wide variety of television and film work, his music evoking a lush symphonic sound that will nicely remind listeners on these shores of the late John Barry. Now with the success of what might be his most moving, and heartfelt score for the Edith Piaf biopic LA VIE EN ROSE, Chandos has taken the opportunity to record a treasure trove of Gunning’s greatest hits with the BBC Philharmonic, selections that are no small revelation of the composer’s  lassically-trained talents, especially now […]Read On »


COMMENTS (0)

CD Review: HAPPY NOW soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 02/05/2011
Happy Now soundtrack | ©2010 Movie Score Media

Euro-specialist label Movie Score Media now goes digging into the ghosts of their favored composers’ pasts with their “Discovery Collection”- a cool niche within a niche that reveals what might be a real spook with 2001’s long-buried score to HAPPY NOW. And it’s likely that ATONEMENT Oscar winner Dario Marianelli is similarly smiling due to the light that MSM is shining on his atypically wacky mystery score for an uber-serious composer, one which chronicles a Welsh politician’s amazement that the girl he and his mate most definitely murdered years ago is now back in town. Listening to the soundtrack’s Theremin-like […]Read On »


COMMENTS (0)

CD Review: 48 HRS. soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 02/03/2011
48 HRS. soundtrack | © 2011 Intrada Records

While James Horner showed he could go where no Enterprise scorer had gone before with his breakthrough, nautical-styled space adventure for 1982’s STAR TREK II, it would be that year’s 48 HRS. which truly showed him off as being far from a one-note composer. If audiences hadn’t seen this kind of hilariously foul-mouthed, squib-filled “buddy cop” movie before, then they certainly hadn’t heard the vibrant, ethnic spin that Horner put on the genre – a ferociously energetic approach that made KHAN’s musical wrath sound positively sedate by comparison. Horner likely keyed off of the manic urban energy that filled Eddie […]Read On »


COMMENTS (0)

CD Review: THE ILLUSIONIST soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 01/26/2011
THE ILLUSIONIST soundtrack | ©2010 Milan Records

There have been many terrific, epically in-your-face scores for this year’s exceedingly tasty crop of Hollywood CGI toons. So it’s particularly nice to hear the powerful gentility of his beautifully animated French film, one that just received a deserved Oscar bone nod to the quickly vanishing hand-drawn pictures that used to be the category’s, and industry norm. That’s also very much the theme for director-animator-composer Sylvain Chomet’s fable about the waning days of vaudeville, as embodied by a magician who plies his rabbit about Europe in the early 60’s. Where Chomet’s equally wonderful, and far more antic TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE […]Read On »


COMMENTS (0)

CD Review: RED HILL soundtrack

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER 12/02/2010
© 2010 Milan Records | Red Hill Soundtrack

It’s ironic that two of the coolest wild west scores to arrive in years both hail from Down Under, as Dmitri Golovko’s RED HILL joins Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ THE PROPOSITION as prime examples of how to give an old musical warhorse a shot of ferocious outlaw energy. But where PROPOSITION’s nerve-jangling percussion brought modern experimentalism to a blood-soaked period piece, RED HILL shoots its raw, old-school acoustic sound into a contemporary western- in this case playing the last stand outback sheriff standing against a recently released villain out for some biblical payback. There’s very little that’s Aussie here […]Read On »


COMMENTS (0)

CD Review: KUNG FU / MAN IN THE WILDERNESS

By DANIEL SCHWEIGER
© 2010 Film Score Monthly Records | Kung Fu Soundtrack

It’s finally time to snatch a pebble out of Film Score Monthly’s hand with this soundtrack two-fer, which combines music from two poetically different scores for men seeking their way in the American outback. The first traveler just happens to be everyone’s favorite Shaolin fugitive monk Cain, whose mystical tête-à-têtes with his teachers are front and center through much of KUNG FU. Though designed as a concept album in 1973 by composer Jim Helms, some score purists might take umbrage to so much dialogue on an FSM release. Yet it’s almost hard to imagine Helms’ harmonies without the Confucianisms, the […]Read On »


COMMENTS (0)
  1. Pages:
  3. 1
  4. 2
  5. 3
  6. 4
  7. 5
  8. 6
  9. 7
  10. 8
Increase your website traffic with Attracta.com

Dr.5z5 Open Feed Directory

bottom round