February 23, 2012

  • Review: Music from the Twilight Saga (Silva)

    Here is take one of what will likely be a future updated release of music taken from the first four films of the popular Twilight film series.  For Silva's  present release, their house orchestra, the City of Prague Philharmonic, tackles this music featuring conductors James Fitzpatrick and Evan Jolly on the podium.

     

    It certainly makes for a nice bookend that Carter Burwell’s music opens and closes the disc with seven selections from Twilight and five from Breaking Dawn.  The disc opens with a strong performance of “Edward at Her Bed/Bella’s Lullabye” though with some tentative high string playing.  The latter melodic idea casts its shadow across the selections here.  One is reminded in the selections from Twilight how intimate Burwell’s score is for this film with delicate scoring often quite exposed in its simplicity and the composer’s unique harmonic choices.  The addition of electric guitar textures alternating with piano passages works well here.  Some electronic ideas can be discerned in these recordings adding extra texture to tracks such as “I Know What You Are.”  In the selections from Breaking Dawn, Burwell continues to build on his material quite well.  “Love Death Birth” has moments that recall his score for Miller’s Crossing with its Irish-like melodic scoring and a new thematic idea that rises up.  Interestingly, some of the menace of the music also has a decidedly Shore-like sense to it at times and like it belongs to an indie-Western in other places (“A Nova Vida”).  “A Wolf Stands Up” is the first semi-action cue in the collection here which starts off with pulsing percussion that moves under a stop-and-start melodic idea.  Oddly, the most horror-music like moment occurs in “You Kill Her You Kill Me,” the final track which sets up the story for the next film.  While it makes for a fitting close,  it is a bit jarring after the lulling music which essentially preceded it.

     

    Alexander Desplat’s score for New Moon essentially fills out the arpeggiated ideas of the first film with a couple of unique melodies heard in the title track which is quite good here.  One is struck how Desplat’s music honors Burwell’s approach and layers in his own style for this score.  The orchestra responds well to this slightly larger scale approach.  The music though tends to be rather repetitive over the six selections here even for Desplat with hope that at least something would happen to break up the monochromatic feel of the music.  (Of course, there are some who would say this is the fault of the story and film itself.)  The music choices are mostly of the melancholic romantic mode with more of Bella’s theme in fuller sound and with a bit more unsatisfied longing.  A piano performance of “The Meadow” simply repeats the previous music traversed in a fine performance by Stanislav Gallin if the data received is correct.

     

    The choice of the piano selection makes for a fine segue into Howard Shore’s “Compromise/Bella’s Theme” from the third film, “Eclipse.”  From the opening bars, it sounds as if Shore reconfigured some of the intervals and musical gestures slightly to create his own thematic material.  Pianist Evan Jolly tackles the music from this score that continues in that dreamy new age sound.  Shore keeps up the arpeggiated idea with some lyric lines carrying thematic material over the top.  “Jasper” is the most like a Shore musical work with scoring and harmonic shifts reminiscent of the composer’s other fantasy work.  It is certainly the closest to overwrought danger that appears musically here.

     

     

     

    This is a fairly good compilation presenting key music from the series, though by nature the album tends to be a rather melancholic collection.  It does allow for a rather quick comparison of compositional styles from three quite different composers.  Both Despat and Shore manage to stay true to their own styles while reusing some of Burwell’s primary material.  Fans of the scores will be interested in this release with its representation of music in smaller chunks.