It is often written that certain people were born to do certain things; this even extends to the world of film music, where there are several instances of the general consensus being that a certain composer was born to score a certain film. This cannot be more true than with Band of Brothers: Michael Kamen was born to write the music for this series. Many people were affected by what they saw in Steven Spielberg's excellent Saving Private Ryan and there was a demand for more material about the second world war; from that notion, the ten-part television series (executive produced by Spielberg and Tom Hanks) Band of Brothers was born.

Kamen was in truth rarely given due credit, but was truly a composer who always wrote directly from the heart. While he was typecast for a while as a composer for action movies, he managed to escape that unfortunate misconception in the mid-1990s by writing the superb but disparate Mr Holland's Opus and Don Juan de Marco in the same year, and then go on to even greater heights with The Iron Giant and his symphony, The New Moon in the Old Moon's Arms. Band of Brothers can certainly be considered at least an equal to those fine works.

John Williams's music for Saving Private Ryan made for a remarkably moving album, but Kamen's work here surpasses perhaps even that. His main theme is magnificent, a moving choral piece that instantly paints a picture of the bravery, nobility and honour of the men who fought evil in the war. It is made all the more poignant by the tragic events that were unfolding about the time of the series' première, as the world once again descended into a disturbing conflict; and now of course it seems all the more poignant following Mr Kamen's tragic passing.

The second and third cues are extended concert arrangements of the other two main themes. These are equally impressive, highly memorable and brilliantly evocative of the various emotions associated with the fighters in the war. Thereafter a series of cues are presented from the individual episodes, running from less than a minute to over ten minutes in length; this is mostly quite sombre underscore, but it all remains highly-moving.

The series itself was not perhaps quite as good as critics initially painted it - while it was certainly effective in giving an impression of the horrors that people had to go through, it perhaps lapsed occasionally into slightly confusing narrative, but even so overall it was certainly a resounding success and it contained one episode that was among the most profoundly moving things I have witnessed on television, as the company discovered a concentration camp. Kamen's "Discovery of the Camp" manages to express the horror of the US troops and the misery and despair of the Jewish prisoners. Just as moving is the use of Beethoven's beautiful string quartet in C-sharp minor at both the beginning and end of the episode; it fits perfectly with the tone of Kamen's music and is included here on this album.