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Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The use of Charlotte Church's name and voice in A Beautiful Mind is handled in a far more professional fashion than the highly debated, current use of Enya in Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings. The appearance of Enya in the latter score came across to many fans as a publicity stunt, as it should, because the new age star's voice was used for only a sliver of the The Lord of the Rings score... and even then it was inserted with an easily identifiable break between Shore's and Enya's recordings. This is not the case with Charlotte Church for A Beautiful Mind. While the packaging may emphasize Church's lovely, though short song on this album, her voice carries several sections of underscore with its haunting and ageless qualities. I must admit that I have never been much of a fan of Church's recordings because I could never, upon listening to them, figure out if I was listening to a child or an adult. That exact combination of innocence and mature vocal development has caused the mass, wild excitement over her albums, however, and I will fully acknowledge myself as a minority in my opinion. For A Beautiful Mind, however, Church's voice worked beyond all my expectations. Interestingly, the ageless quality of her performances works stunningly well when she performs without lyrics. Her appearances in the underscore are limited to a handful of tracks, but her excellent mixing and heartfelt tone sets an otherwise typical Horner score apart from his other string-heavy, melodic efforts of late. She unselfishly blends into the massively-mixed orchestral performances as merely one fluid element, ultimately making the vocal presence in A Beautiful Mind a more poignant subtlety than uses of the female voice in pop scores like Titanic. Once again, to be put in the straightest terms possible, if you are bothered by the now infamous "Horner self-ripoff technique," then don't bother with A Beautiful Mind... Hit the back button on your browser. At times, the similarities between his scores are too blatant for even Horner supporters (such as a seemingly "composed on the same day" sound in Bicentennial Man and Deep Impact). Every once in a while, though, Horner writes a motif, or explores a new scheme of instrumentation, that vanishes after three minutes of a particular score and never resurfaces in years to come. One such unique moment in Horner's career (up until now) was the creatively jumbled and percussively diverse opening cue for Bicentennial Man a few years back. That one track was the distinguishing mark of that score, and Horner finally expands upon it and makes it the heart of the mathematical mind in A Beautiful Mind. With an enthusiastic piano leading the way, this frenetic style of thematic development builds itself through the constant shifting of key while maintaining enough pleasant, major key harmonies to establish itself as a theme in and of itself. It's a complex dance of the orchestra, allowing a single rhythm to be passed from section to section with a remarkably inspirational and upbeat spirit. Substitute Church's voice for the woodblocks in the Bicentennial Man cue and you get a more delicate, but fluid version of that motif. With the bass strings mixed so heavily that the floor of my office shook, this so-called "Bicentennial-machine's world" motif/theme drives the score for A Beautiful Mind in four or five of its lengthy cues. Thus, if you hate those self rip-offs by Horner, you might as well stop reading now and forget it. The key shifts are, after all, nearly identical between the two scores. But alas, the story of A Beautiful Mind has two sides. While the orchestra dances through the key shifts representing the mathematical genius of John Forbes Nash, Jr., the darker self-discovery process that nearly derailed his run to the Nobel Prize is handled in a much more introverted way by Horner. The painful and tragic inner-travels of Nash are tackled with a heavy and broad string approach, leading to several very lengthy cues of meandering and suppressive cues of a seriousness that Horner used often in Deep Impact and The Perfect Storm. While pleasant to the ear, these cues extend for sequences that may lose the interest of the listener after several minutes. The magic of Church's voice from the cues of mathematical triumph is replaced by solo woodwind instruments for the dark passages. With the basses still mixed heavily, the cues offer a formidable, though consistent underscore. Although it may cause some awkward moments in the listening experience, Horner's choice to expand upon the "Bicentennial-machine's world" motif/theme was a remarkably astute choice to represent Nash's brilliance, because there could be no greater a contrast between than that and the broad bass string brooding that Horner was probably going to employ for the darker half of A Beautiful Mind anyway. On album, it may be a little disappointing to hear the rambling fun of the orchestra suddenly cease without warning and delve into the depths of despair, but if you think about the character of Nash, it's not only appropriate, but clever as well. Before you can understand my rating of Horner's A Beautiful Mind score, it's important that you know that yes, his repetition of style does bother me. Despite including some strong cues, I never sit and listen to Deep Impact, Bicentennial Man, or The Perfect Storm. They do, after all, present essentially the same music in differently colored packages. I am, in contrast, a tremendous fan of Horner's when he decides to go off on a tangent, such as for The Mask of Zorro or, though we hate to admit it now, Titanic. Bicentennial Man, in only its opening cue, offered a quick glance through the keyhole of a door leading off to another such tangent. After years of wondering "what if Horner had expanded that sheer energy of percussion and rhythm of the orchestra into a full score," A Beautiful Mind kicks that door open and gives us a better look. Buyer beware, however, that due to the overriding seriousness of the film, these cues of mathematical dancing with Church's voice are limited to only a few cues. But to this pair of ears, that further exploration makes the album worth the price. The actual song by Church near the end is surprisingly mellow... not the kind of inspirational or overwhelming effort that you felt was the intention behind the Horner/Celine Dion collaborations. The song alone, relying on the operatic rather than the pop, may not be enough to propel this album into Horner's elite. Further restraining the album, perhaps, is the fifty minutes or so of deep, extended underscore. It makes for a fine listening experience for a total of over seventy minutes, and it doesn't feature a loud mood-breaking set of cues in any sequence, but the lack of enough of the flashy Church performances with the full, dancing orchestra may hold this one back. Nevertheless, A Beautiful Mind is a clever and momentous score in its highlights and a solid background listening experience in its moodier lengths. The album is an autoloading "enhanced CD" (when will labels get it through their heads that some people can't "turn off" the autoloading function on their PCs?) with a good, albeit short collection of goodies; included are interviews with Ron Howard and Horner himself, who appears to have gained both some weight and a scruffy beard. ****
The insert contains no extra information about the film or score, but the CD is an enhanced product with textual and videos interviews with Horner and Ron Howard, along with pictures from the film and a trailer. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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