A review by JAMES SOUTHALL

Intrada has done some great things for film music fans over the years, and its latest enterprise is another welcome step forward.  They recently announced a "Signature Edition Series" of very limited releases of scores for very small movies but where the music is by big-name composers.  I've always felt that it is this type of project that really separates the men from the boys, so to speak, when it comes to film composers: it's actually much easier to write a decent score for a 100-piece orchestra for a blockbuster than it is to write for a tiny ensemble on a more intelligent, but less high-profile, picture.  An ideal example is the first release in the series, Christopher Young's The Tower.  The movie is a ghost story directed by the composer's nephew, Gedney Webb.  It's a short film, shot on the shores of Lake Michigan, about an overstressed man who returns to his childhood summer home, where he meets a ghost.

With the film sounding, on a surface level, a little like The Ghost and Mrs Muir, Young approached the movie in a similar way that Bernard Herrmann approached his, all those decades earlier.  Writing for a very small group of musicians dominated by piano, harp and violin, he has fashioned an outstandingly beautiful work which shows what a composer he really is - sure, he can write the blockbusters with the rest of them, and his jazz is always great fun, but a work like The Tower showcases his real talent.  He states an excellent, mournful, reflective theme and gradually develops it over the course of the score until it ends up in the final track as a statement of almost soaring beauty, despite - or, perhaps more appropriately, because of - its modest orchestration.  Subtle changes in pace or harmonic language are used to particular effect by Young at provoking an emotional response.  His deftness of touch here is most impressive.  This music is dreamlike and - if you pardon the pun - haunting; the beauty, truly enveloping.

One of the score's great assets is that the tracks are long.  There are only five of them, but the album runs a shade under forty minutes, which gives the composer real time to develop ideas within pieces.  His music is intelligent and moving.  It is sad in a way that probably the biggest single factor in this score being so touching and beautiful is that Young was free of the pressures and interference of a thousand producers and studio men, and leaves a feeling of mild frustration that composers aren't allowed to write this kind of score within the studio environment.  Young is an underappreciated composer, certainly one of the finest around at the moment, and The Tower is certainly his most gentle and possibly his most impressive work so far.  If Intrada's Signature Edition Series can maintain the standards of the first release, we're in for a real treat.

Tracks

1. Amour de Fantôme, I (7:43)
2. Amour de Fantôme, II (8:39)
3. Amour de Fantôme, III (4:01)
4. Amour de Fantôme, IV (12:01)
5. Coeur Hanté (6:58)