Filmtracks: Tale of the Sleeping Giants (Panu Aaltio)

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Written 1/5/22, Revised 8/25/23

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Buy it... if you desire an ambitiously colossal expansion of Panu Aaltio's nature documentary sound, merging symphonic elegance this time with nontraditional vocal and percussion techniques.

Avoid it... if you approach this genre with expectations of consistent melodic accessibility, for the very uniqueness that defines the sound of this score will alienate those seeking familiar comfort.

Aaltio

Tale of the Sleeping Giants (Tunturin Tarina): (Panu Aaltio) The Finnish series of nature documentaries beginning with 2012's Tale of a Forest and including 2016's Tale of a Lake has earned international acclaim, and the production team's 2021 follow-up, Tale of the Sleeping Giants, debuted to immense popularity in the country. Delays caused by the pandemic allowed the film to enjoy extended post-production consideration and generate tremendous regional hype. The filmmakers tackle the mountainous region of northern Scandinavia, shooting 850 hours of footage over three years on the barren terrain with an eye for the landscape and the wildlife of the era, culling that material down to 77 minutes for the final film. Extreme cold temperatures and fickle animals required patience, grit, and technological advances to coordinate the endeavor. The formula for Tale of the Sleeping Giants is a bit different from its predecessors in that its addressing of the mysticism of the region is paired with emphasized storytelling elements related to the animals followed, putting the movie more in line with other contemporary wildlife documentaries. Like the prior films, though, composer Panu Aaltio's music plays a pivotal role, often dominating the soundscape when not competing with the sounds of nature. While Tale of a Forest was a capable documentary score with a handful of highlights, Tale of a Lake remains a memorable classic in the genre, showcasing the composer's talents and offering stunning lyricism along the way. From the perspective of compositional quality, Tale of the Sleeping Giants sits somewhere between those two scores, more ambitious in its style but not as attractive from start to finish. Aaltio intentionally sought to shake up the music for this third film, taking a risk by diminishing the streamlined orchestral and vocal approach from Tale of a Lake and instead seeking nontraditional vocal and percussion techniques that will define the score for many listeners. The Finnish orchestra Tapiola Sinfonietta is applied to most of the work, though the composer relies upon the Finish vocal group Tuuletar for distinctive style, the four women of that ensemble known for combining hip hop, folk, and tribal spirit with the Finnish language to yield unusual vocal textures.

It's not unusual for composer to want to experiment with new directions in a franchise, but audiences may not be ready for Aaltio's choices in Tale of the Sleeping Giants. There is symphonic beauty to be heard in the score, certainly, but it's layered with aggressive percussive tones of an organic nature, the stylized vocals, and unrestrained synthetic augmentation at times that goes beyond the composer's usual blending of virtual sweetening with organic recordings. On the other hand, some of the ingredients do remain the same, passages for cute animals receiving exuberant, light-footed orchestral performances led by woodwinds. These bouncy clarinet passages, along with timpani applications and the use of brass to beef up the weight of dramatic cues, are all carryovers from Tale of a Lake. These scores tend to suffer from some amount of fragmented musical narratives, and the storytelling element of Tale of the Sleeping Giants presented Aaltio the opportunity to build a tighter arc in his themes. He responds with a pair of main themes that is consistently applied, but their enunciation isn't always complete and their fullest versions are rather rare in application. As such, this work ultimately plays less as a cohesive thematic tale and more as an impressionistic tour de force. The massive orchestral statements are fewer, the dramatic cues for the changing of seasons are a bit more subdued, and the wacky moments for animals at play reserve some of their energy. On the other end of the spectrum, Tale of the Sleeping Giants contains a few cues that will likely outright repel some listeners, requiring a reprogramming of a lesser length of music to yield an enjoyable companion to its predecessors. Fortunately, there are plenty of remarkably wonderful highlights hidden throughout the score for combining into such a presentation. Don't be surprised if you end up shunning the vocal effects in their most obvious sequences. Their mixing into the work ranges from extremely subtle rhythmic whispering to outright singing of a high, abrasive tone similar to James Horner's Avatar. They are replaced in several cues by an operatic solo female voice more akin to the one utilized in Tale of a Lake, though its mixing here is moved further back and supplied more reverb so that it emulates Howard Shore's The Lord of the Rings trilogy of scores. Not surprisingly, these moments are uniformly delightful.

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The nontraditional vocal performances by Tuuletar in Tale of the Sleeping Giants form their own motific base aside from Aaltio's central themes. They dominate throughout "The Message," which opens the album but actually closes the film, and they faintly contribute over wind-like effects in the middle of "God of Wind," where they truly excel. The group's soft chanting returns in the second half of "The Ice Breaks," while whispers in the middle of "Crown Snow" under distant wails strike more of a new age tone. The calls reminiscent to Avatar emerge by the end of "Battle of the Birds," but they adopt a percussive-like effect after a minute in that cue that is more interesting. The Avatar mode returns in the performance of the main majestic theme during "Muskoxen," and it sounds a bit better in this context. The pulsating rhythmic vocals return in the middle of "The Giant Era," while the fully layered whispering from earlier in the album presentation return in "Crow Syndicate" at the end. The two formal themes by Aaltio for Tale of the Sleeping Giants may not reveal themselves easily to listeners; the composer sometimes stews with only their underlying chord progressions for minutes on end, and fragments of their structures tend to pop up as counterpoint to other material. The two ideas, the cyclical theme and the majestic theme, also overlap in several instances, both in their full thematic forms and in their counterpoint fragments. While the cyclical theme may seem like the score's main identity due to its mere frequency in bits and pieces, it is the majestic theme that receives the work's only massively dramatic moments for either theme. A series of similar three-note phrases in succession, the cyclical theme is exactly that, its repetitive main sequence eventually adding two notes as a bridge between each phrase in the full version of the theme. Its chords open "The Message," the three-note phrases debuting at 0:59 on seemingly a processed woodwind. In that end credits cue, Aaltio starts to develop the proper theme at 3:30 with the bridge notes, allowing the idea to fully mature by 4:30 on strings. A solo female voice at 6:15 performs the most formally developed version of the theme with amazing elegance. The cyclical rhythm opens "Crown Snow" on synths and percussion, while the three-note phrases inform suspense on woodwinds late in "Stoat and the Owl." Woodwinds carry the same three-note figures at the end of "Bird Island" as well.

The cyclical theme in Tale of the Sleeping Giants really starts to shine when it overlaps Aaltio's majestic theme, as it does when it serves as counterpoint to the majestic theme in the middle of "Muskoxen." After also closing that cue, the cyclical theme returns similarly at 0:29 into "Jaybird and the Mole" against the majestic theme but recedes to underlying chords that persist throughout "Ants" in delicate suspense. The idea faintly opens "The Giant Era" but develops into the full theme on flute, taking on the same form as in "The Message" in the middle of the cue; the strings perform the full cyclical theme leading up to the burst of the majestic theme. The album returns the theme to vocal rhythmic form at 1:04 into "Crow Syndicate" before shifting to a nice new melody at the cue's end. The majestic theme is a little more straight forward in Tale of the Sleeping Giants and is the identity most memorable from the score. Solemn at 1:49 and 2:27 into "The Message" over the rhythmic three-note phrases of the other theme, the majestic theme achieves full brass force at 4:55, its repetitive phrasing building momentum as it goes. Hints of its progressions open "God of Wind" quietly and consolidate nicely at 1:44 even without the actual melody utilized. A solo female voice finally provides the actual theme at 2:56 into that cue with really pretty harmonics. Fragments of the idea emerge two minutes into "Crown Snow" and extend to a solo piano later in the cue. The sudden vocal outburst of its progressions late in "Battle of the Birds" is highly annoying, but it reprises its monumental symphonic form at 1:02 into "Muskoxen" with the cyclical theme as counterpoint. Also against the cyclical three-note phrases is the majestic idea at 0:29 into "Jaybird and the Mole." Hints occupy the first half of "Fall Colors" before Aaltio moves into new melodic territory later. Echoing the expansive performance of "The Message" but with more female vocals is the summarizing performance of the majestic theme at 4:14 into "The Giant Era." It softly opens "Crow Syndicate" with perky vocals and metallic percussion, and the solo female voice offers it at 0:24 like in "God of Wind," but in almost Chinese erhu tones. Aside from these two major themes, Aaltio tends to restrain his many other melodies to particular scenes or characters. And there are many of them, which is understandable given the conventions of the documentary genre of music. Sadly, though, some of the most alluring themes of the score reside in these brief parts.

A fantastic family theme conjured for the reindeer in Tale of the Sleeping Giants is strong enough to anchor a whole score on its own. It's heard at 0:14 into "Birth of a Reindeer" on winds, building to a lovely ensemble performance at 1:46, and the theme persists at 0:09 into "Friends," where it rotates between woodwinds as an accent to the separate friendship theme; the full string section's vigor at 0:56 sadly closes out the score's presentation of the idea. The friendship theme is a structural variant of the family theme, opening "Friends" and repeating several times with chipper strings and triangle. The only other theme to carry over substantially to multiple cues is Aaltio's upbeat bird motif, used throughout "Wagtail and the Eaglet" (and big at 1:45 with optimistic spirit) and opening "Jaybird and the Mole." He moves to a separate identity combining phrasing of the cyclical and majestic themes for the outset of the "Bird Island" cue, building to a powerful performance at 1:34 with more traditional voices in support. This motif returns to percussive delicacy later in that cue, woodwinds imitating earlier vocal effects in the score. Notable singular identities for particular scenes are encountered at 2:03 into "The Ice Breaks" (the work's only poor temp track exposure, clearly emulating the nature theme from The Lord of the Rings) and throughout "Muskoxen," where a solo voice at 0:33 is quite lovely. The exuberant "Fox Family" theme and Vic Mizzy flair throughout "The Scary Vole" are also standouts. On the other hand, detriments to the score include the stoic percussive slapping of "Battle of the Birds," the totally disjointed Latin flavor to harpsichord to rock guitar of "Ruff Revue," the understated, percussion-dominant "Wolverines" with unique woodwind accents, and the disappointingly devoid "Salmon Spawn." These misfires range from obnoxious to disengaging, forcing the listener to pull together cues like "God of Wind," "Bird Island," and "Fall Colors," along with a number of the wildlife-centric character moments, for an impressive half hour of superior material. When not trying to impress with the usual vocals and percussion, Aaltio's Tale of the Sleeping Giants is a slightly lesser but still solidly pleasing sibling to Tale of a Lake. A digital-only release in 2021 was followed by a limited 2023 CD set along with the prior two scores. Listeners unsatisfied with the sometimes overly augmented sound of the prior scores (or the composer's work in general) will appreciate the more expansive ambience of this recording, even if that scope comes with unconventional sounds attached. The composer's risk was worth taking here, but the result will alienate some listeners seeking more accessible beauty. **** @Amazon.com: CD or Download

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