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Review of Possession (Gabriel Yared)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... if you appreciate Gabriel Yared's ability to consistently provide high quality, emotionally distraught, aesthetically beautiful, orchestrally rich, and occasionally powerful music for dramatic settings.

Avoid it... if you have no tolerance for Yared's strict adherence to a subdued and often glum romantic classicism that often restrains the appeal of his works.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Possession: (Gabriel Yared) Following his critical success with the contemporary story of Nurse Betty, director Neil LaBute adapted the A.S. Byatt tale Possession, 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 The English Patient began a widespread awareness of this sound, and it was further explored in Message in a Bottle and The Talented Mr. Ripley. A solid example of Yared's ability to provide a melancholy backdrop for a contemporary, urban setting remains Autumn in New York, 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.  ***

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 67:02

• 1. Possesso (Aria) - performed by Ramon Vargas (5:04) • 2. The British Museum (2:10) • 3. Gentle Possession (5:27) • 4. Discovering the Letters (3:23) • 5. Maud and Roland in North Yorkshire (3:20) • 6. Christabel's Room (1:59) • 7. Maud and Roland (3:41) • 8. Blanche's Diary (1:58) • 9. Etude to Christabel (2:36) • 10. Let Down Your Hair (3:51) • 11. Dolly Hides a Secret (2:42) • 12. Possession (5:14) • 13. Reading the Letters (5:17) • 14. Blanche's Suicide (2:11) • 15. Exile in Brittany (2:27) • 16. Renewed Correspondence (4:05) • 17. You Have a Daughter (2:26) • 18. Journey to Whitby (1:47) • 19. A Hotel Room in Whitby (1:54) • 20. Poignant Thoughts (1:56) • 21. Possession (Full Orchestra) (3:26)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes a lengthy note from director Neil LaBute about the film and score.

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