: (Gabriel Yared) Following his critical success
with the contemporary story of
, director Neil LaBute adapted the
A.S. Byatt tale
, in which two young university professors uncover
a plethora of love letters written by two Victorian era poets who were attempting
to pursue a romance despite the strict societal mores of the time. While the two
poets reach out to each other, so do the two professors in modern times as they
travel in search of the complete story of the two poets. The film conveys a
distinct sense duality during its shifts between time periods, showing audiences
both pairs of characters as they evolve and drawing predictable but still
satisfying connections between them. The music for the film, therefore, was met
with the challenge of appealing to the sensibilities of modern audiences while also
serving the needs of the Victorian poets' romance. Although his activity in the
Hollywood and larger American film scene had been limited, accomplished classical
European composer Gabriel Yared was hired to produce the music for the project. His
previous scores for similar subject matter had been, if not successful, at least
consistent in their postmodern statements of classical ideas with origins in the
history of film music. His Academy Award winning score for
. A solid example
of Yared's ability to provide a melancholy backdrop for a contemporary, urban
setting remains
, a score rich with solemn texture. The
task of appealing to the ears of modern audiences while also appeasing the need for
a Victorian score was handled with a simple orchestral touch by Yared, a sound that
will very likely appeal to avid collectors of the composer's works.
Instead of blatantly composing for two separate worlds and
attempting to weave the two sounds together as the couples become closer to one
another, Yared provides an umbrella theme, one which could suffice for both sets of
characters while varying enough in tone and instrumentation to denote the changes
in setting. To this end, he created a lavish, waltz-like theme with enormous
structural scope and the required somber performance to represent the repression of
the Victorian society. The result is a magnificent title theme that is restrained
slightly by its own weight but still qualifies as a melodramatic affair of the same
broad, expansive size as many of John Barry's popularly dramatic works of the
1980's. Yared employed the techniques of
Possession quite often in his
better known works.
The English Patient was a similarly subdued effort
(taking an enormous performing group and holding it on a leash just long enough to
provide an epic sound for languishing characters) and one of his better entries of
the 1990's,
Message in a Bottle, was a devastatingly haunting score of
immense size as well. Yared writes for the vocal performance in
Possession
with the same kind of immeasurable solace that was heard in the Sinead O'Connor
performance of "Lullaby for Cain" in
The Talented Mr. Ripley. This time,
Italian tenor Ramon Vargas, whose voice is both rich and darkly hued, makes a good
match for Yared's title theme for the score. The title presentation of "Aria" at
the beginning of the RCA album is no doubt the highlight of the presentation, with
the full orchestral power of the waltz and the tenor embodying all the gravity of
Yared's somber style. The remainder of the score offers two smaller motifs rather
than any significant subthemes, both of which maintain the same strong orchestral
integrity. The lush, romantic performances of the strings specifically are a
throwback to the days of high romance in 1950's and 1960's American cinema, and
they will likely appeal to collectors of swooning music from the Golden Age of film
scores.
Never does the score vary from the string-dominant journey of the
primary four characters, developing very slowly and always maintaining an element
of restraint. The weakness of Yared's work for
Possession, not surprisingly,
is exactly that restraint. The composer has shown the ability to burst out with
major key themes of a faster tempo, and certainly these talents could have been
employed to represent the modern professors in this film. There is a brief glimpse
of this kind of heightened pace in "Journey to Whitby," but the idea dies as
quickly as it gains your attention. Instead of continuing with a similar sound,
Yared, probably with the blessing of the director, draws increasing parallels
between the two couples in the consistency of orchestral style and theme in both
worlds. While likely functional, this approach leaves the listener wondering how
the score could have been improved upon if Yared had begun with a more contemporary
sound for the professors while maintaining the waltz for the Victorian poets. Then,
over the course of the film, he could have drawn the two together musically, until
such a time that the modern pair could have been greeted with a full performance of
the waltz from the other era. In any case,
Possession remains a work of a
very typical kind for Yared. It is high quality, emotionally distraught,
aesthetically beautiful, orchestrally rich, and occasionally powerful in substance.
On the other hand, this score takes no chances and offers no true duality from
which the story could have benefited greatly. The conservative effort plays well on
album, with over an hour of solid, uninterrupted orchestral classicism. For some
listeners, its consistency is so static that the score may become "boring beauty,"
so to speak. The tenor performance in "Possesso" at the beginning is the obvious
highlight. It may very well be an effort that plays better on album than in the
film, but either way, the music leaves you wondering where this foundation of
strong ideas could have traveled had Yared taken a more diverse approach to the
project.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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| Bias Check: |
For Gabriel Yared reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.11
(in 10 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.17
(in 19,476 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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