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Ultimately, Howard wishes that he had been given more time to write a longer score for A Hidden Life, but he was thrilled that 30 to 40 minutes of his music ended up in the picture. (Having recorded only roughly 40 minutes anyway, his endeavor has to be considered a success.) "It was a notch I wanted on my gun," the composer stated. "You need to go in with your eyes open, which I did, and never had any problem at all." Howard has also expressed approval of the many classical pieces that Malick chose to utilize in the film, seeing his role as weaving these insertions together with a pair of his own themes. "I think the stuff he put in there is absolutely gorgeous," he continued. "I wasn't worried about it being a mashup. Sometimes my pieces replace them. So for me, there was no question I was going to remain in a traditional 19th-century modality." For the darkest portions of the film, Malick tended to apply George Frideric Handel to the Nazi element, Arvo Pärt for the tragedy of conscriptions, and Henryk Górecki for the concept of death. Howard's task was to address the serene and flowing romantic connection between the leads and their increasing challenges as a pair. He and the director talked extensively about providing both hope and despair for the lead couple, and this duality became Howard's two themes for the picture. The composer supplies individual motifs to other choice cues for Malick to apply as needed, most obviously in "Surrounded by Walls," but they remain more atmospheric in nature. The palette for the score includes 45 players and violin soloist James Ehnes, with whom Howard had collaborated on his recent concert work. The strings carry the bulk of the music, with piano, clarinet, flute, and harp contributions joined by subtle percussion and electronic sound design for a few cues. The intrusive bass in these darker, ambient passages, such as "Morality in Darkness," tends to disrupt the listening experience on album because the heavy bass in these cues overwhelms a soundscape that otherwise requires louder volumes with which to appreciate the violin, cello, and piano contributions elsewhere.

The main attraction in Howard's brief score for A Hidden Life is his main theme of hope and romance for the lead couple. Malick had expressly desired a melody that flowed like the river in the village, and Howard obliged by resurrecting his similarly fluid string and piano rhythms from The Village and infusing them with faint hints of Lady in the Water. These lovely passages for violin and piano rhythms offer a pair of six-note phrases, most frequently for the solo violin, and their sincerity is both beautiful and timeless in "A Hidden Life," "Love and Suffering," and "Knotted." In that third cue, Howard adds the clarinet and flutes to the rhythmic recipe with fantastic resonance. More subdued renditions of this theme occupy "Return" and "Hope." As Howard incorporates a solo cello into the mix, the work takes on more of the personality of Defiance. The "Knotted" cue was a specific request from Malick for a duet that would represent the two leads; Howard responds with the cello and violin in counterpoint on the main theme until the violin closed out the sequence alone. These classically romantic passages offer Howard lyricism at its best, the composer able to draw maximum emotional response from relatively few players. For enthusiasts of the melodic portions of The Village and Defiance, these gorgeous moments are pure bliss. The second theme of importance in A Hidden Life represents the despair of the husband's predicament, embodied by a series of falling chords for strings in "Descent" that would have been at home in Zimmer's The Thin Red Line. Also similar to that score is Howard's "There Will Be No Mysteries," which provides wishy-washy treble ambience prior to a closing reprise of the main theme. On album, the soundtrack occupies 69 minutes, with less than 40 of those from Howard's score. In reality, there are only 10 to 15 minutes of lastingly appealing romantic renditions of the main theme on the album, but don't let that brevity deter you from appreciating just now fantastic that material can be. The rest of the work is accomplished but not overly pleasant, and the classical interjections do disrupt the intimacy of Howard's otherwise poignant recordings. The highlights of this score are a must-have for any compilation of the composer's lyrical triumphs.  ****   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For James Newton Howard reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.4 (in 70 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.36 (in 86,418 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

Total Time: 69:29