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Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulen (known to Western audiences simply as "Amelie") was a magic realist romantic comedy by French auteur Jean Pierre-Jeunet which introduced French composer Yann Tiersen to listeners worldwide. Tiersen's whimsical, deceptively simple instrumental music was equally influenced by composers like Chopin and Satie, as well as contemporaries such as Michael Nyman and Philip Glass, and emerged as an enjoyable blend of European classical music and French folk. Playing a variety of instruments from piano and violin to accordion and xylophone, Tiersen composed a number of delicate, charming pieces which suited the somewhat magical mood of the film very well and deservedly made him a star in his own right.© Sergey Mesenov /TiVo

When John Williams received his 29th Academy Award nomination for Schindler's List, he had already won Oscars for Fiddler on the Roof, Jaws, Star Wars, and E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial. He had long been an automatic nominee, but as Hollywood's most honored working composer it was generally believed that it would take an extraordinary addition to his legacy for the Academy to award Williams a fifth trophy. Schindler's List would prove to be that extraordinary work -- and not just because of the enormous historical and social import of the film and it's subject, though those factors could only have strengthened Williams appeal to Academy voters. Schindler's List feels like his attempt at a magnum opus. Though even simpler in its melodies and themes than some of his famous sweeping popcorn movie scores, it carries the ambition of a major symphonic composition. This is especially true in the segments that are graced with exquisitely rich and evocative violin solos by world famous violinist Itzhak Perlman. Perlman's masterful performances give Williams' compositions an authenticity and grounding that offsets the composer's predilection for sentimentality and bombast. "Restraint" was the word that appeared most frequently in discussions of Steven Spielberg's Holocaust epic. The critical consensus was that the director had managed to depict the horrors of the greatest tragedy in world history without giving in to his customary urges to tug transparently at the heart strings of his audiences. In truth, Spielberg was only able to exercise restraint through the first two and a half hours of the film; he ended up throwing it out the window in the maudlin conclusion. Williams, too, is guilty of indulging in emotional excess. Which isn't surprising when you consider that his music has always been one of Spielberg's most effective heart-tugging tools. Like the film itself, his score is best at its simplest, deriving its emotional power from the events it depicts and bearing in mind that audiences do not need help from filmmakers and composers in order to be emotionally affected by the Holocaust.© Evan Cater /TiVo

Released in 1986, this Roland Joffé film with Robert de Niro and Jeremy Irons recounts the conscience tragedy that befell the Jesuits in the 18th century when they were forced to abandon their mission on the Guaraní in South America. As is often the case with Ennio Morricone, the score he wrote is witness to the successful marriage of a certain classicism and other external elements (namely multicultural) that are grafted together. The introductory track (appearing in the end credits) embodies this aesthetic with extraordinary force and emotion: we encounter a celestial indigenous choir, tribal percussions, as well as a mystical oboe (On Earth as it is in Heaven). On Falls, it is a mysterious and spellbinding pan flute which interprets the theme, while the oboe - this time accompanied by a harpsichord - is used once again by the composer on Gabriel’oboe. The other tracks on the soundtrack are of an infinite richness, passing from tenderness (the flute/guitar dialogue on Brothers) to darkness (Remorse, Refusal, Alone), from melancholy (Carlotta) to action (Ascunsion). © Nicolas Magenham/Qobuz

Bernard Coulais, who is admired for his scores for Winged Migration and Microcosmos, is again showing his resourcefulness in using instruments that are available to him. The soundtrack for the popular European film Les Choristes combines songs, sung by the boys' choir in the story, and regular soundtrack music to accompany the action of the film. Christophe Barratier, the film's director and a classical guitarist, wrote the main theme of the film, "Cerf-Volant," which is woven into the first track "Les Choristes." But Coulais composed and arranged most of Les Choristes' score. Themes from the songs are woven into underscore tracks, which are written along the lines of scores by Rachel Portman or Danny Elfman, and they demonstrate Coulais' facility with instrumental and vocal color. Affecting melodic material is tied to rhythmic accompaniments, primarily using strings and light woodwinds, with brass and percussion providing reinforcement at times. Other tracks add the choir or harp, piano, or celesta to the mix. The opening "Les Choristes" is similar to Fauré's Pavane, with a soloist singing with the accompaniment of the choir and pizzicato strings. "Action Réaction" is an adagio for strings, beginning in unsettling dissonances and ending in dark unison. Songs written for the film have memorable melodies, easy lyrics and generally easy harmonies, perfect for a chorus of schoolboys (not to mention soundtrack sales). These include a very brief, jolly arrangement of a folk song about a legendary highwayman, "Compere Guilleri." "In Memoriam" tests the boys' part-singing skills with its frequent passing dissonances in its harmonies, which remind you of Mozart's choral writing. The boys are not always pitch perfect or together, but then they shouldn't be, as they are portraying a group of boys just beginning music lessons. Nor do they sound like a crystalline English boys' choir, but the unpolished dimension of their voices blends well with the rich orchestral writing. While there are a few tracks that obviously are film music and do not quite stand up by themselves, the soundtrack as a whole is charming and listenable, with an appeal of its own that should attract more than just fans of the film.© TiVo

This album is not just about the southern Italian tarantella dance; it actually proclaims itself as an antidotum Tarantulae, an antidote to the bite of the tarantula. Both the spider (which is not the same animal as the feared tarantula of the southwestern U.S.) and, indirectly, the dance are named for the city of Taranto in southern Italy. La Tarantella presents tarantellas interspersed with other songs of the region, some traditional, others with known composers. The texts of the vocal pieces are in southern Italian dialects, translated in the booklet into modern Italian, French, and English. The liner notes, in French and English only, are a delightfully diverse lot, with excerpts from writings dating back to the Renaissance, medical and more metaphysical musings on the "tarantism" phenomenon, and several passages that invite the listener to experience the tarantella phenomenon for herself or himself. The pieces included touch not only on the dance but on phenomena that influence the bodily "humors" that the spider's poison was thought to affect. Thus there are songs of love, night, poverty and alms-giving, and more. Some are dances with lots of percussion, others are melancholy. As L'Arpeggiata leader Christina Pluhar writes, "Each of these pieces presents a musical universe in itself, and is functional, therapeutic music, which could stretch over several hours or days, as required. The decision to enclose these dances in a restricted period of time has a practical basis: the real amount of time that can be pressed on a CD." Keep this in mind if L'Arpeggiata gives a concert in your town! "It is left up to the listener to play the pieces in sequence, or to pick out a song that elicits a particularly strong reaction from him," Pluhar goes on.Plainly, this is one of the more original album conceptions of recent years. If you're afraid of spiders, don't buy it; there are several close-ups of the beasts in the booklet notes. And, since the tarantella is still ritually danced in certain southern Italian towns, it would be interesting to know whether it's a louder thing, danced to music with a stronger tendency to break down physical and mental defenses, than what Pluhar presents here. The dominant sound on La Tarantella is Pluhar's Baroque harp, accompanying some very expressive but subtle singers. These questions aside, La Tarantella is quite an intellectual adventure, and you can't say that about every early music release.© TiVo

The original 1976 record and initial CD versions contain half a magnificent film score, half jazz-lite cover versions of the same music. Bernard Herrmann's soundtrack, full of dark, brooding brass, menacing percussion and a bittersweet dash of jazz saxophone, greatly enhance this big city tale of obsession, paranoia and violence. Robert DeNiro's chilling narration of "Diary of a Taxi Driver" -- including the famous "You talking to me?" monologue -- served as one of the models for the anger and isolation inherent in much of punk music. For some strange reason, the entire first side of the album is devoted to bland covers of Herrmann's music by arranger Dave Blume. Thankfully, Blume's arrangements are unnoticeable in the film itself, but their inclusion here distracts from a powerful soundtrack. Blume's arrangements are firmly rooted in L.A. mid-'70s fuzak, while Herrmann's score is one for the ages.© Rick Watrous /TiVo

Coming off a double Oscar win for his Breakfast at Tiffany's score, Henry Mancini produced this score for the Howard Hawks-directed, John Wayne-starring safari comedy. This is at first a fun blend of jazz and Afro-exotica, jungle drums mixed with a classic bop combo. Elsewhere, however, the soundtrack opts for some pleasant, but very Western jazz, only stopping for the African instrument-sampler "The Sounds of Hatari," which features some nice treated piano. The filmmakers were probably hoping that the Mercer and Carmichael song "Just for Tonight" would be as much a success as Tiffany's "Moon River," but if Hatari! is memorable for anything, it's for the incredibly goofy "Baby Elephant Walk," which has gone on to be infamous musical shorthand for kookiness of any stripe. Get this tune in your head and it sticks.© Ted Mills /TiVo

John Barry's fifth Oscar-winning score is a profoundly moving body of music, generally (though not entirely) elegiac in tone, very much like the movie for which it was written. It's also a bit of a mixed bag, occasionally falling back on material that will be familiar to fans of the James Bond movies that Barry scored during the early- to mid-'60s. The main title theme uses some of those devices -- dense, heavy string passages adjacent to trumpet calls -- but it is hardly representative of the full score. The real heart of Dances With Wolves is the pensive, tragic "John Dunbar Theme," which is far closer in spirit to Barry's music for Somewhere in Time or They Might Be Giants -- films (and scores) far removed from the Bond movies. It seems as though, when Barry is asked to write music for characters who are complex and troubled (Bond is neither), he delivers the goods in the guise of musical material that reflects those elements. Some elements familiar from the Bond films can be found scattered throughout this soundtrack, particularly in the violin-driven "stings" that open "The Death of Timmons" and the horn calls that herald its closing; in the string parts underneath the hyperactive percussion of "Pawnee Attack" that might've been lifted right out of From Russia With Love; and also in "Stands With a Fist Remembers," with its secondary violin part in the upper register of the strings. Much of Dances With Wolves, however, shows a broadening of Barry's sound -- he uses the vast canvas of Kevin Costner's movie and Dean Semler's cinematography as the basis for one of the most richly scored soundtracks of his career, working with one of the largest orchestras ever heard in one of his films; "Journey to Fort Sedgewick," "Kicking Bird's Gift," "Two Socks at Play," "The Death of Cisco," and "Journey to the Buffalo Killing Ground" have an almost Copland-like majesty about them, and "The Buffalo Hunt" is one of the finest pieces of music the man ever wrote. At times, it sounds as though Barry had every string and horn player in Los Angeles present, and topped it all out with an oversized percussion section, but none of the music or the scoring here sound excessive. Dances With Wolves was reissued with two bonus tracks in 1995. The 2004 reissue expanded some tracks and added still more material to present the soundtrack "in its entirety."© TiVo

Forrest Gump was a sugar lump of a movie, a fact driven home by this album containing Alan Silvestri's saccharine score, all cute little piano high notes and swatches of melody rolling out of the string section. There is also a two-disc soundtrack album containing pop songs heard in the picture. It's music to watch feathers waft in the breeze by, and is therefore appropriate to the film, although it has little value on its own.© William Ruhlmann /TiVo