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| Preisner |
The Secret Garden: (Zbigniew Preisner) Now
considered to be among author Frances Hodgson Burnett's most famous
novels, "The Secret Garden" has been adapted to the stage and screen
numerous times, one of which an Agnieszka Holland film released in
America in 1993 and United Kingdom the following year. While not a
resounding success immediately,
The Secret Garden was well
received critically and has, over time, accrued a good standing with art
house crowds. Its story is one of childhood escapism, one that
encourages freedom of will and the healing power of friendship and the
outdoors. A young girl living with her unloving parents in India at the
turn of the 20th Century is sent to live with her uncle at a stately
manor in England when those parents are killed in an Earthquake. The
rather snotty child eventually starts to warm to the staff of the estate
and is transformed for the better in her personality when she discovered
a secret garden on the grounds of the manor. She also strikes up a
friendship with the young son of her often absent and emotionally
distraught uncle, and with the help of others against the wishes of the
lead house maid, she assists the disabled boy in escaping the confines
of his bedroom and start walking. The key to these transformations is
the magical healing power of the garden, which is the ultimate bonding
agent that eventually brings all the major characters together into a
blissful state by the end of the picture. Collaborating with the Polish
director was fellow countryman Zbigniew Preisner, who was suggested to
write the music for
The Secret Garden by producer Francis Ford
Coppola. Preisner's career in film scoring, active from the mid-1980's
to the mid-2000's, remains best known for his collaboration with Polish
director Krzysztof Kieslowski and the trio of scores in the
Three
Colors franchise. During that height of recognition in the early
1990's, Preisner scored
The Secret Garden in between the first
two of his
Three Colors assignments. While his music for
The
Secret Garden was acknowledged as a tremendous asset to the film at
the time of its release, the score has continue to build upon its
positive reputation in the years that have followed, and it's not
uncommon for this work to represent the only one of Preisner's typically
romantic compositions in the average film music collection. Part of the
success of this soundtrack is attributable to the innocently beautiful
Linda Ronstadt performance of "Winter Light," the ethereal end credits
song that seamlessly combines the two best themes from Preisner's score
(those for the garden and the main boy) into a stunning resolution to
the tale.
Few scores rely upon a classically rich sense of style
as much as
The Secret Garden. Its refined instrumental precision
suggests that a stuffy atmosphere is likely to dominate the music's
personality, but Preisner balances this sound with folk rhythms and a
sense of lyrical mysticism that appropriately forces the period sound to
adopt a whimsical stance. The orchestral ensemble is never applied with
convincing force in the score, instead dominated by extremely well
enunciated chamber-like solo lines of activity in a very dry mix. The
lack of depth in the ensemble is sometimes bothersome, but Preisner's
intent was clearly to emphasize personal development rather than the
kind of "in your face" magical representations of nature as heard in
Jerry Goldsmith's
Legend. That said, there are exotic elements at
play in the score, most of them concentrated in "Main Title," where the
Indian location is addressed with a seeming combination of acoustic
guitar, harp, and sitar. The blurriness of the layered woodwind
performances in this cue is remarkable even though Preisner doesn't
develop any of the score's themes in this eerie opening. For the garden
itself and the progress made by the main boy in the story, the composer
takes the choral route, the former element afforded a handful of pretty,
straight forward boys choir accompaniment in the middle of the score and
the latter character represented by a solo boy's voice in two poignant
cues later. The score is rich with thematic development, with four
themes developed consistently and usually informing the activity of any
given cue. The score's main identity is tied to the garden and logically
doesn't appear until the mid-section of the work. In "Entering the
Garden" and "Walking Through the Garden," Preisner establishes the idea
with the deliberate simplicity of a children's carol. Further
development in "Taking Colin to the Garden," "Colin Loves Mary," and
"Happily Ever After" puts increasingly optimistic instrumental tones
into the theme. The main girl has a theme that is eventually overtaken
by the garden's theme; her individual identity is a somber, descending
series of formal phrases in "Leaving the Docks," "First Time Outside,"
and "Shows Dickon Garden." The boy, conversely, receives a purely fluid
and lovely theme that stuns with its first statement by solo voice in
"Colin Opens His Eyes" and continues to impress in "Colin Senses Craven"
and "Happily Ever After." The uncle's stomping theme exists in the three
"Craven" cues, the score's most ominous, waltz-like expressions of stern
reprimand. Together, these themes and the extremely deliberate
instrumentation of
The Secret Garden make the score a clear
winner despite its understatement overall. Devastating to the 31-minute
album is the absence of the Ronstadt end credits song, however, an
absolutely necessary companion to Preisner's lovely score.
@Amazon.com: CD or
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- Music as Written for the Film: ****
- Music as Heard on the Album: ***
- Overall: ****
The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
