Klaus Badelt has had an auspicious start to his scoring career, with three excellent scores in a row (The Pledge, The Time Machine and Invincible). Though two of those are co-credited to Hans Zimmer, Zimmer's rôle was more supervisory than compositional, and perhaps the most surprising thing about the three scores is how unlike Zimmer they sound. Most of the composers to emerge from his Media Ventures emporium end up sounding like second-rate versions of Zimmer (no, scratch that, they all did until Badelt) but he seems to have managed to develop something of a different sound. It's a step back, then, that for K-19 director Kathryn Bigelow (Female Gigolo?) wanted a score that sounds like Crimson Tide. Zimmer was either unable or unwilling to work on the film and so despatched Badelt in his place, but the constraints of the young composer's creativity are quite apparent.

The action music does sound like Crimson Tide, the calmer moments sound like Gladiator and there's very little that sounds like Badelt. (There's even - not all that surprisingly - stylistic snippets of Basil Poledouris's Prokofiev rip-off choral music from The Hunt for Red October.) The main theme is quite impressive, a very slow, almost elegiac piece for strings - but it's not really impressive enough to sustain 75% of the album's long, long running time, which is unfortunately what is expected of it.

The opening four cues are labelled as "Suite for Orchestra and Chorus", each giving one of Badelt's main ideas for the score, and without trying to be too rude, those fifteen or so minutes of music give all you need - the remaining hour is pretty redundant as a result. Most of the music is oppressively earnest (pious, even), bleak enough to give the claustrophobic atmosphere perfect for the film, but turgid enough to render the album a very difficult listen.

In fact, the most notable thing is certainly the identity of the music's conductor, which I'm sure has garnered a fair few double-takes - Valery Gergiev conducts the Kirov Orchestra, which is something akin to Herbert von Karajan having agreed to conduct Goldfinger (I'm not kidding). It also generated something of a political storm, because the Kirov recorded while in Washington DC for a concert and it was against the terms of their entry into the country, and the AFM was subsequently in uproar.

That aside, there's nothing especially noteworthy about K-19: The Widowmaker. It's good music, sounds exactly like Hans Zimmer, but its running-time is intolerable.

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