Buy it... if the flourishing romance of James Horner's usual, broad strokes of orchestral beauty are too grand and repetitive for your liking, and you prefer a much more intimate and restrained approach to his dramatic style.

Avoid it... if you believe that the dramatic weight of a low budget, dialogue-driven atmosphere is often compromised by its own sparse construct, no matter the composer.

Horner

House of Sand and Fog: (James Horner) Pushed by Dreamworks to a release date as late in 2003 as possible, House of Sand and Fog was always a project with high Oscar hopes. The debut of television commercial director Vadim Perelman, the film closely follows the bestselling novel of the same name by Andre Dubus III (an Oprah Winfrey Book Club entry). Its premise is one of highly internalized societal drama, with no clear cut good and bad characters; Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingley's primary roles square off in a clash of dreams and culture over the possession of a singularly loved house in the hills of California. With the American owner (Connelly) wrongfully thrown out of the home due to a taxation error, an exiled Iranian colonel from the Shah's elite inner circle (Kingsley) moves into the home to start a new life of the American dream with his family. The battle of wills between the two main characters occupies the heart of the story, making it one of the more intensely personal stories of the year. Several cast and crew members carried over to House of Sand and Fog from the Academy Award-winning A Beautiful Mind, including composer James Horner. The year 2003 was one dominated by dramatic efforts of all sizes by Horner, for whom House of Sand and Fog was the fourth and final score of the year. The close nature of the story, as well as undoubtedly some budgetary constraints attached to a $16 million production, caused Horner to scale back his usual recording standard to a more intimate level than heard by collectors of the composer in several years. Horner orchestrated his own moderate composition and removed the brass section from the Hollywood Studio Symphony, causing the score to immediately take on a different personality than his other three scores of 2003. He also utilized synthetic elements for a substantial part of the work, dwelling with these electronic sounds in an extremely quiet soundscape. It had been many years since Horner held this level of restraint in his music, and another sign that House of Sand and Fog is a subtle effort is realized with the lack of any notable solo performances for voice or specialty instrument. For a composer seemingly in love with the flourishing romance of his own broad strokes of orchestral beauty, Horner impressively resists of the possibly overbearing role that his score could have played in House of Sand and Fog.

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As many composers do, Horner bases the heart of the score around the piano, which is, more than any other instrument for another setting, the pure and wholesome representative of the warm, suburban American home. Several cues, heard mainly in "Two People" and "Parallel Lives, Parallel Loves," offer meandering piano solos without an overt rhythm, theme, or direction. The feel of the piano's harmonious performances, even without dominant thematic development, suffices in maintaining the tender atmosphere for scenes of dialogue. Horner can't resist creating at least one theme, of course, and that string identity heard first in "The Waves of the Caspian Sea" and throughout the climax at the end serves a fair share of good-natured loveliness in its simplistic construction. Only in the final cue, "A Return to the Caspian, And to the Iran of Old," does the theme exude a truly redeeming attitude, almost bordering on Horner's aim for sincerity that you heard in his children's scores of the early 1990's. The most typical (and likely a tad tiresome) use of instrumentation in House of Sand and Fog is the rumbling of the piano and woodwinds on bass notes accentuated by a tolling chime or bell after each phrase of a progression, the composer's usual method of establishing gravity in a particular moment. This rolling technique, which Horner has utilized throughout his career, is applied in significant abundance here. As in A Beautiful Mind, a slight touch of electronics is to be heard; the majority of the low budget synthetics is employed in the opening half of the score, with a light electronic choir providing depth to only few short cues midway through the score. For Horner collectors, the most interesting music in the score will be the heightened tension heard in the latter half, beginning with "Break-In" and concluding in "We Have Traveled So Far, It is Time to Return to Our Path." The cue "The Shooting, A Payment for Our Sins" presents the first sense of urgency in the work, with a dramatic rhythm established by deep percussion and string plucking and reaching a crescendo of heavier strings at about 10 minutes into the cue. Overall, House of Sand and Fog is an easy score to appreciate, but a more difficult one to enjoy on album. Its dramatic weight is sometimes compromised by its own sparse construct, but it respectfully serves its purpose with class. It gained Horner an Oscar nomination, a relative surprise and, among the composer's vast collection of superior works, an undeserving one. ***   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13 (in 98 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 184,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.