CD: Cinderella (2015)
Score: Very Good
Label: Walt Disney Records
Released: March 10, 2015
Tracks / Album Length: 30 tracks / 76 mins.
Composer: Patrick Doyle
Special Notes: n/a
Review:
Patrick Doyle’s score for Disney’s 2015 version of the classic fairy tale is a graceful, buoyant work distinguished by an incredible lightness, due in large part to an orchestral palette emphasizing light woodwinds, gentle string passages, and a rather romantic piano accompaniment. The score’s opening track, “A Golden Childhood,” features an energetic midsection reminiscent of Disney’s own classic animated feature films where themes halt, encircle, and leap with youthful-like energy, and strings tend to sweep or lull the listener into states of calm or wonderment. It’s a writing style framed by a classical film scoring artifice, dripping with sentimental theme renditions with the occasional dark shades in lower strings.
The plus side is Doyle’s score is very charming and intricately orchestrated – the orchestra’s performance is really lovely – but it’s very much a mono-thematic score, and even at its midpoint, on album it begs for some different shades, if not secondary and tertiary thematic material, but most of the album features an interpolation of score and source material, of which the latter comes in the form of waltzes, polkas, and other traditional dances which are lovely, but most are cut from the same main theme. Even a return to tender theme versions like “A Secret Garden” reiterates the same emotional information, making Cinderella of interest primarily to avid Doyle fans, and those clearly enchanted by Disney’s latest take on a iconic fable.
Disney’s album features a perfectly engineered score and the shorter dance pieces, plus a contemporary vocal version of the main theme, an orchestral vocal, and Helena Bonham Carter crooning the classic “Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo.”
© 2015 Mark R. Hasan
Additional Links:
Editor’s Blog — Composer on IMDB — Composer Filmography — Soundtrack Album
Select Merchants:
Amazon.ca
Category: Soundtrack Reviews
Connect