MOVIE MUSIC UK

by Mark Walker

There’s a moment in the second episode of the HBO-RAI TV series My Brilliant Friend that encapsulates for me everything about the subtle art of Max Richter’s film scoring. In a pivotal sequence the two young girls, Lila and Elena, decide to venture outside of their Neapolitan ghetto for the very first time. It is, naturally, Lila’s idea. She’s the daring, wilful, feisty one; contrast with middle-of-the-road Elena, always afraid to challenge the status quo, yet irresistibly fascinated by the allure of her brilliant friend. The scene is richly symbolic and tells us much about the relationship between the pair that will develop – in the course of Elena Ferrante’s wonderful novels and in this astonishingly faithful and utterly riveting TV adaptation – throughout their lives into adulthood and old age. As the girls pass under the ominous railway bridge – a literal and metaphorical gateway to the outside world – they hold hands, they shout joyfully making echoes in the tunnel, they are excited about the journey ahead.

Richter scores all this initially with just a piano – simple arpeggios, a very simple melody, his wistful motif for Elena and Lila in fact. As the girls walk along the dusty highway, the string ensemble joins in, solemn legato chords enhance the feeling of melancholy. This seems odd at first, since the trip has begun with such apparent optimism. Then, as thunderclouds build overhead and we see Lila start to drag her feet, there’s a touch of magic – a solo violin takes over the poignant melody, soaring above the ensemble. The music has been telling us all along that this is not going to be the jolly adventure we and the characters had imagined.

The music stops as Lila stops and abruptly insists they go back home. Elena, oblivious up to this point, is dismayed. As the years go by it will be Elena who escapes the ghetto, gets an education, goes to university and builds a life on the outside, while brilliant, mercurial Lila will remain forever imprisoned in the grimy, poverty-stricken streets where they grew up. This failed journey to the seaside foreshadows it all, as does Richter’s subtle scoring.

Max Richter typically doesn’t write music-to-picture in the time-honoured Hollywood manner: he tends not to mimic the on-screen action at all, but – as in the example above – nevertheless his compositions can and do enhance the emotional impact of key sequences extremely effectively. This sometimes happens retrospectively when directors choose to track Richter’s music into their movies: his most famous piece, On the Nature of Daylight, was not written for a movie at all, yet it has cropped up several times – in Shutter Island, for example, and Arrival, in both cases underscoring the bittersweet memories of the main character to devastating emotional effect.

It’s therefore not easy to tell whether any specific piece by Richter was written for a particular scene or even a movie at all. This can be off-putting for film music fans, who tend to like music that follows the dramatic contours of the action and that was written to order for that scene and that movie. Richter’s music, by contrast, might seem static, divorced from any specific context.

Except that’s not quite true. In the case of My Brilliant Friend, Richter brings a particular sensibility and a particular style into play – the jaunty opening title music, for example (the track Whispers on the Season 1 album), has a Baroque, Vivaldi-esque playfulness to it. And that, for me, is a key to unlocking some of the mysteries of Richter’s music. It’s not a coincidence that in 2012 Richter released his Vivaldi Recomposed album, a modern reworking of The Four Seasons. Richter’s particular brand of minimalism might be formally related to modernists like Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but he gets a good deal more of his inspiration from 18th century exemplars like Vivaldi and Bach. In this respect he follows in the footsteps of Michael Nyman, to whom Richter definitely owes a stylistic debt (for example, the track The Days Go By on My Brilliant Friend’s Season 1 album is closely modelled on Nyman’s cue Memorial from The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover). But where Nyman’s mock-Baroque writing is a tongue-in-cheek parody, Richter takes it all much more to heart. His modern-Baroque minimalism, unlike Nyman’s, is always consciously beautiful – that is to say he borrows from the 18th century more than its mannerisms, he adopts that era’s commitment to musical form and structure and, above all, to the beauty of melody. Even in his more electronic-dominated music (for example, the soundtracks for Ad Astra or Spaceman) a beautiful melody is always lurking just around the corner. Throughout his scores for My Brilliant Friend (three seasons so far, with a fourth in the offing), Richter absolutely keeps melody front and centre.

The Season 2 album, as if to demonstrate the point that Richter’s music is sufficiently malleable to be reused in a variety of contexts, contains a lot more pieces tracked in from his other albums and fewer original cues. As a result, this is for me the weakest of the collection, with only six out of fourteen tracks being newly written. The album includes Winter from the Four Seasons, and Spring from the same source crops up as a repeated motif in Season 3. The Season 3 album, while still only having five original tracks (out of twelve) features a central set of new Romances, variations on yet another poignant and beautiful melody, this time with more than a hint of Schindler’s List in its incarnation for orchestra and solo violin (Romance I). Or should that be Vivaldi? Compare this Romance with some of the violin writing on Richter’s Four Seasons – the music on each album complements the other perfectly.

Film music fans who grew up with the dazzling orchestral acrobatics of Golden Age Hollywood and the likes of John Williams will need to adjust their expectations when encountering a Max Richter score for the first time. The closest comparison I can think of is some of Hans Zimmer’s recent work, which, like Richter’s, is also inspired by minimalism yet also rejects its excessive rigidity (Zimmer’s Interstellar, for example, takes stylistic cues from Glass’s Koyaanisqatsi but infuses it with a great deal more soul). Richter, like Zimmer, knows that music above all else must speak to the heart. He never loses sight of a classical sense of musical composition as something with shape and form and line: in short, something that is always supposed to be beautiful.

Recommended Listening:

If you are looking for a way into Max Richter’s unique music, try these (all released on the Deutsche Grammophon label):

• My Brilliant Friend, Seasons 1-3 (the first album has the most new material)
• Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons
• The Blue Notebooks (includes On the Nature of Daylight)
• Voyages: Essential Max Richter (a ‘best of’ compilation, including several cues from film scores)

Once upon a time, a long, long, time ago, Mark Walker had the idea to create a guide to soundtracks on CD, organised by composer not film title, something no one at the time had done. The result was the Gramophone Film Music Good CD Guide (1996). His passion for movie music remains (almost) undimmed to this day.