Tree of Life

Best ever Music at the Movies

What’s your favourite film score? We ask the question from time to time. Responses usually range from classics like The Godfather, Psycho and Born Free to more contemporary fare, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Hours. Great choices and all quality scores from serious composers whose skills created music that both enhanced the director’s work and enjoyed an afterlife in the concert hall.
I watched a film this week that made me want to ask a further question. What for you has been the best use of existing classical music on a movie soundtrack?
Merchant Ivory did it well. Helena Bonham Carter falling in love in Florence to Puccini, Hugh Grant doing the same in Kings’ College Chapel to Allegri’s Miserere. Would Kubrick’s 2001:A Space Odyssey have been the film it was without Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra and didn’t Peter Weir’s use of Vaughan Williams in Master & Commander change the way you appreciated Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis.
Terence Mallick’s latest film Tree of Life has had critics reaching for superlatives for its scope and ambition in setting the trials of one man’s life against his place within the universe, for its extraordinary visual musings on the origins of life and the spiritual hereafter. But Mallick’s loving embrace of classical tunes was what I most admired. Clearly confident that his vision would not be overshadowed by Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier, Smetena’s Vltava, Couperin’s Barricades Mysterieues and Gorecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Psalms. And how thoughtful and sensitive to focus on the grief of a family in mourning with Preisner’s Requiem for My Friend, itself a tribute to another fine auteur Krzysztof Kieślowski

You can hear Mark 6-9am Monday to Friday and 9-12pm on Saturday on Classic FM

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