Film Music
Much love and life, hope and mistakes are bound by catharsis. Much hate and self-loathing, disinterest and avoidance is released by paranoia. Delusion binds the two mini world’s together, where the mind is a constant monologue of reflexive thought. Of course; for musicians need a stream to bathe in, it can be found tranquil, and in the soundtrack genre composers use tranquility and nominative modes to structure a set of sounds that do not wallow.
Soundtrack ingredients – also the bane of cinematography – is illusory to the deficit between personable hardship and plot line, gravy train and gravy lake. You can get stuck in false completions and knots in the resulting album or albums (mainstream film adaptation The Hunger Games is a prime example of trilogies; Morricone the go-go pencil in film scores for exceeding three decades easily) where track sequestration becomes hard to undo.
There is also the aspect of veneration in music turning from pointillism to pointless. Mikhail handles his work comparatively masterfully, calling a bluff to paint the noir, the noise and the nomadic ecstasy of disc one. The entirety of the collection compiled concisely by Mikhail’s beloved wife, the master sound is primarily settled in soundtrack jazz, slight neoclassical wafts floating in. It leaves the definition of new music as suffixed by library music attributes of suspense and contextual gravity. Place a meaning on a songs heat, the song sheet is read out with notes reverberating beyond a classical chamber music background.
This mood continues into CD two. Manning the flamenco guitar for a 50s-lite (the bisect period between serious pop and shiny flowery people begun in 1959), “Along My Street For Many Years” better than titular sets up CD 3’s rather cheerful lament riposte “Your Voice”, which is further away with the fairies and insatiably catchy, a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory bonus scene where the children get high on a sugar loop instead of porridge and oats.
Compendium highlights here, for example “Moscow In Morning” are hard to separate from the weakest tracks, but then there’s the variation on harpsichord probing interdimensionality, and that’s no problem for Taridiev because he has a lot of skill and consistency within. The vocal performances are as strong as the string sections, but only just – pick up a hint of a Pierre Schaffeur melody and add a Nancy Sinatra mezzo and you’re good to go more than Lebanese (pardon the food menu mezzo reference to mezzo soprano tautology). Phrasing is genially crisp and grants more than three years of wishes. It shows most in the piano tones and how scaling works solidly across the release. Not surprisingly the least successful instrument in terms of sounding dated is the use of woodwind (and slightly-tinny-before-its-time-sounding drum machine) precise percussion. “Dance At The Stadium” for contrariwise understandable reasons stands out for me due to the horns hauling a bit of pomp from a crowd pleaser of a tune.
Ultimately 2015’s Film Music 3CD is a remarkable showcase, but be warned – films steep themselves in tradition, so did the 40s to 70s in an exponential curve waiting for punk to bowl a straight line wicket. Mikhail Taridiev may be less heard of now, but thanks to all his management, what we have here is a truly international accomplishment of world’s colliding, gently – music, and film.