CD: Monuments Men (2014)
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Rating: Very Good
Label: Sony Classical / Released: February 4, 2014
Tracks & Album Length: 25 tracks / (60:32)
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Special Notes: n/a
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Composer: Alexandre Desplat
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Review:
Alexandre Desplat channels the spirit of classic Hollywood film scoring with this large-scale orchestral work featuring a buoyant melody for George Clooney’s WII caper film, and some wonderful tense, churning suspense motifs (“Ghent Altarpiece) which frequently wind down into short bursts of lighthearted material.
Desplat’s inspiration feels like a marriage of Elmer Bernstein (especially The Great Escape), Ernest Gold, and maybe a little Bruce Broughton, but Desplat’s innate gift for melody and theme variations with mercurial twists are very much a part of his own style.
It is striking to hear a score virtually bereft of any electronic elements – there’s a softly repeated chord in Stokes Talks” which may well be a fusion of just brass and strings evoking an organ – and Desplat’s instrumental palette emphasizes strings for the more furtive, churning passages, and woodwinds for lighter accents in skulking cues like “John Wayne.”
In “Finale,” the score’s main themes and motifs are assembled into a solid 9 min. narrative which is one of the score’s most satisfying cues because Desplat was given room to develop and expand his material. The brevity of several cues – often quick theme statements – are slightly repetitive, but the score’s quite memorable for evoking a specific style (“Finale” has some discordant brass reminiscent of a Universal monster score), and the delicate orchestrations which really gleam in this beautifully engineered recording.
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© 2014 Mark R. Hasan
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External References:
IMDB — Soundtrack Album — Composer Filmography
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