Film Music 2011 from Silva Screen America - Review

The Casual Annual
Review by Edmund Meinerts

Another year of film music passes, and as usual, Silva Screen Records have released their annual compilation album, FILM MUSIC 2011. Twelve cues have been selected from various well-known films, with five of them recorded by the Prague Symphony Orchestra and the rest receiving a reimagining by London Music Works. As usual with a compilation album such as this, the target audience is not so much the devoted film score collector as it is the casual one, providing a brief overview of the year’s film scores in an easily digestible, 47-minute playlist.

The album opens with one of the year’s best cues, the glorious “Thor Kills the Destroyer” (1) from PATRICK DOYLE’s THOR. Though the rest of the score attracted some criticism for its employment of recent blockbuster stylistics that some felt didn’t sit well with DOYLE’s more lyrical style, this particular cue is a two-minute outburst of sheer, unbridled heroics – a necessity on any best-of-2011 playlist. The performance here is impressively close to the original and opens the album in style. “Lily’s Theme” (2) follows, ALEXANDRE DESPLAT’s major new identity for HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS, PART 2. It’s a pretty cue, and its inclusion makes sense, though it is perhaps not the score’s most robust or memorable.

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