The Village (Score from the Motion Picture)

Album Review

The explosion of interest in soundtrack music in recent years hasn't been limited to the Hollywood classics — indeed, for every two or three restored versions of film scores from 1940s or 1950s movies that appear, there seems to be at least one exhumation of a more recent vintage. Thus arrives James Newton Howard's music for Andrew Davis' top-notch political thriller The Package (1989). It was easy to neglect the music while taking the fast-paced action and excellent acting in the movie, a topical yarn dealing with conspiracy and assassination — Howard has since become a major composer in the field, but at the time he was just another name in the movie's credits at a time when soundtrack albums were no longer standard accompaniment to all movie releases. But the neglect at the time can also be attributed to the fact that this is not an especially great or subtle score; in fact, it telegraphs perhaps a little too much of what is going on in the plot, although it is busy and expressive, and the use of certain motifs is interesting if a little over-the-top in this setting. One wishes that the score were pitched a little more subtly, because there are parts of it — that are not "mickey moused" — that could work as absolute music; the string, brass, and horn writing works beautifully, but whenever the electronic instruments or the percussion come in, most of the subtlety disappears. The annotation concerns the relationship of the score to the movie, mostly from the standpoint of underscoring the plot, but on the plus side, all of the musicians in the orchestra are named in the notes.