The Hours (OST)

There are movies where you notice the soundtrack, and others where you don't. The latter is usually considered ideal, and yet it's impossible to ignore Philip Glass' pervasive, all-encompassing soundtrack while watching Stephen Daldy's celebrated follow-up to Billy Elliot (the same could just as easily be said of Elmer Bernstein's majestic music for Far From Heaven). This isn't such a bad thing -- far from it. The piano-dominated score, incorporating motifs from Glass' Satyagraha, Glassworks, and Solo Piano is, by turns, lush, sumptuous, and stirring. Michael Riesman is the pianist, the Lyric Quartet provides the strings, and Nick Ingman is the conductor. The fruits of their labor -- and artistry -- add depth to the action on screen without ever quite overwhelming it. The complicated storyline, based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (which was, in turn, inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway) is inherently dramatic and emotionally compelling enough that it doesn't really "need" music to get its message across. And the actors, including Nicole Kidman (Virginia Woolf), Julianne Moore (Laura Brown), and Meryl Streep (Clarissa Vaughn), breathe such life into these three distinct characters, living in three different time periods, that they don't need really need the music either. But it's always there, like a ghostly presence in each woman's life, helping to tie their divergent storylines together as much as the themes that are common to each. In the end, the score is as much a unifying force as Peter Boyle's deft editing and, most importantly, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which was originally to be called The Hours. The CD booklet includes liner notes by Cunningham (focusing on his longtime admiration for Glass), excerpts about each character from his novel, and stills from the film.

The score for the movie adaptation of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, composed by Philip Glass. The music is somewhat continuous, all built upon the same basic motives. The repetition of a three-note phrase is key to the course of the whole, emerging time and time again as the framework for variations around which the rest of the music is arranged. Beyond the simple three-note bits, repetition in general stands as an important part of the music, with the various works eventually dovetailing together in the same basic framework, bringing a sense of return as they come up. The movie features three separate stories of women, all interlinked in the same Virginia Woolf novel, whose lives share recurring themes with one another's. The music stands here to make an auditory note of the parallels with its repetition. The sounds stay relatively mundane for the majority of the work, mirroring the everyday lives which form the basis of the characters' struggles, but it can also go quite dark for periods, touching on the suicidal tendencies held by the various characters in the story. Standing alone, this album might seem rather lackluster with its general sense of dreariness and the unstopping repetitions, despite the prime performance by the Lyric Quartet. Alongside the movie or the novel, however, the score holds a deeper meaning, fitting in with the moods of the story quite well. ~ Adam Greenberg

「リトル・ダンサー」のスティーヴン・ダルドリー監督が、ピューリッツァー賞を受賞したマイケル・カミンガムの原作を映画化。ゴールデン・グローブ作品賞・主演女優賞にも輝いた本作のサントラは、現代音楽の巨匠フィリップ・グラスが担当。「ナコイカッツィ」ではヨーヨー・マとのコラボレートを果たしたグラスが、ストリングスによる重厚かつ繊細なスコアを披露している。
bounce (C)星 昭江