Fantastic main theme, lyrical throughout, Yo - Yo Ma, a real pleasure
Disadvantages:
For the most part will not satisfy fans of noisy music
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
Of the four John Williams scores of 1997 (that also icluded Rosewood, Amistad, and The Lost World), I have always considered Seven Years in Tibet to be the best. Rosewood I never have liked, Amistad had a beautiful theme but was pretty standard for the most part, and the Jurassic Park sequel wallowed in the rhythmic darkness of deep jungles so much that the original film's themes were almost completely absent and the new big theme was criminally underused. Seven Years in Tibet, on the other hand, delivers on almost all the fronts that the three others failed in.
Directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Brad Pitt, the film tells the true story of the Austrian mountain climber Heinrich Harrer, who went to the Himalayans to scale a mountain at the outset of World War II and is subsequently arrested and denied his return to Ausria due to his involvement with the Nazi party. This leads him to many adventures before finding himself in Tibet, where he befriends the young Dalai Lama and during the seven years he spends there finds spiritual enlightenment and a dislike towards the Chinese Communist government who are bent on subjugating Tibet before being able to return back home. The film apparently caused quite a stir in China, that even resulted in them banning Brad Pitt from ever entering the country, while the film itself passed by without much notice. Despite some quite beautiful cinematography and a more thoughtful air, the film struck me as being very average and overlong, with Brad Pitt being a poor conveyor of spiritualism near the end of the picture.
To be honest, the only real reason why I ever wanted to see the film, was to hear how the score of John Williams worked within its intended context. When the film was still coming around to theaters, the trailers featured the beautiful main theme from Randy Edelman's score for Dragonheart that was considered as a perfect fit to the film. It is to this day one of the most famous instances of trailer music that inspired people before hearing the actual score, causing many to wonder how could this music possibly be topped. Well, by all intents and purposes, Williams delivered beautifully. However, there is a marked difference between the score as heard in the film and the score as heard on the album. I am very doubtful that the score would not have generated as much interest in me had I seen the film before hearing the album. This is one of the rare instances that Williams' score actually works better outside of the film than in it, and as such can be considered as a mild failure. But it is not something to do with the actual quality of Williams' work, but rather a question of how the music was edited in the film, which was unusually bad.
This score could most easily be described as a companion piece to the composer's classic Oscar-winning score to Schindler's List in its overall approach of using a prominent instrumental soloist, this time featuring the cellist Yo-Yo Ma (as opposed to violinist Itzhak Perlman in the former film). Like Perlman, Ma performs in only a select few places, but still so that whenever he does appear, it is always notable. These performances are sprinkled all over the album, often playing the main theme of the score; and what a main theme that is. First presented in the opening concert suite "Seven Years in Tibet," the main theme is one of the most powerfully sweeping and dramatically lyrical themes Williams has ever written. This long-lined, minor-keyed theme soars in the strings and brass high above the snow-clad mountain tops with that distinctly Oriental flavour that you just feel but can't really describe technically. This opening suite also features a much more traditional Tibetan theme suggestive of the locale in question and a more anxiously urgent theme for Harrer's journey, both which crop up often in the score.
The main theme receives a couple of really standout moments outside of the End Credits/Suite, particularly in the cue "Leaving Ingrid" that begins with Harrer's journey theme and moving on to a presentation of the main theme on piano and cello that soon expands into a glorious full orchestral performance of the entire theme (unfortunately the film cuts out this entire orchestral swell, thus denying the most powerful statement of the theme from ever happening before the end credits). Further fully orchestral performances of this can be heard in "Approaching the Summit" and in the eight-minute "Heinrich's Odyssey" that are always a thrill to hear. Other than that the theme is relegated to Ma's cello and the solo piano in several other places.
What may turn some people off from this score is its great restraint. Outside of these few moments where the orchestra swells with the main theme, the music is mostly very quiet and introspective, which may also account for its lack of popularity when compared with Schindler's List. Cues such as "Reflections" and "Quiet Moments" are ripe for accompaniment for moments of self-reflection or just calming listening for those who don't automatically label everything quiet and calm as being boring. However, this is something I hold as a nice departure from the crashing and banging of many action scores or really most songs heard on radio these days. These quiet cello, piano and low orchestral tones are often very good for relaxation, while always providing music that every so often rises with some material that doesn't allow you to drift into complete drowsiness, keeping its lyrical core at all times without descending to a lot of dissonance for any long expanses of time.
The cue "Young Dalai Lama and Ceremonial Chant" is a bit of an outside track that features more openly ethnic music with Ma's cello solos and some religious chanting of the Gyoto Monks amid a lot of tingling and rattling percussive effects. The track "Peter's Rescue" is possibly the most unnerving cue on the album and the only purely action oriented in the entire score, featuring very low orchestral rumblings, heavily pounding percussion, slashing strings and brass and swift cymbal clashes. The Tibetan theme in the middle of all this brings a great amount of lyricism to the otherwise quite edgy cue, which meshes very well together. In "The Invasion" Williams writes music that is quietly pounding with low piano chords and timpani rolls, coupled with other low-end grunts from the ensemble and unnerving performances from different ethnic instruments, bringing to mind Empire of the Sun.
"Palace Invitation" opens quite amusingly with some more light-hearted and understated festival music that soon becomes more stately in nature with bells and violas doing a small march-type ditty. This in its turn gives in to more quiet harp and celesta plinging, that is followed with more ethnic instrumentation. Finally the cue "Regaining a Son" features a more emotionally saturated melody as Harrer returns home and gets together with his now-grown up son and the two go mountain climbing together to the strains of the main theme. The album concludes with a full reprise of the opening suite that also doubles as the end credits sequence (edited down in the film), and while I have seen some comment that this reprise features some differences to the opening track, I have personally not heard any of these differences, making for a powerful conclusion.
Released by Sony Classical, the album is still widely available both new and used, and often very inexpensively. There is 66 minutes of music included, making for an ample sweep of the entire score, and with the recording being nicely clean and crisp without having too much reverberation, the effect is very pleasing. The combination of the powerfully grandiose main theme, the solos of Yo-Yo Ma, the easy-to-enjoy lyricism and, on a whole, the thematic cohesion make this score definitely the best of the four Williams scores of 1997, and in more general terms, while it doesn't rise to the classic status of say Schindler's List, Raiders of the Lost Ark or E.T., this is a very strong effort from Williams that makes for great listening. With comparison to Williams' more recent score for 2005's Memoirs of a Geisha, Seven Years in Tibet exists in the same restrained sound world of beauty and calmness that makes this album a must for those wanting to escape the hectic life we live in for just an hour or two.
Music as heard in film: ** Music as heard on album: ****
1. Seven Years in Tibet (7:08) 2. Young Dalai Lama and Ceremonial Chant (2:14) 3. Leaving Ingrid (3:43) 4. Peter's Rescue (3:45) 5. Harrer's Journey (4:05) 6. The Invasion (5:08) 7. Reflections (4:41) 8. Premonitions (2:56) 9. Approaching the Summit (5:44) 10. Palace Invitation (4:46) 11. Heinrich's Odyssey (8:03) 12. Quiet Moments (4:21) 13. Regaining a Son (1:48) 14. Seven Years in Tibet (Reprise) (7:08)
Produced by John Williams Music Composed and Conducted by John Williams Cello Solos by Yo-Yo Ma Orchestrated by John Neufeld Music Recorded and Engineered by Shawn Murphy Assistant Engineers: Susan McLean & Greg Dennen Supervising Music Editor: Ken Wannberg Music Editor: Jeff Charbonneau Sony Classical, 1997 (SK 60271)
