Oscar and Lucinda
Oscar and Lucinda, based on Peter Carey’s best-selling novel, follows the unpredictable turns of two people from opposite ends of the world who come together in a story of faith, love, fate and chance. Oscar Hopkins is a flame haired minister who thinks like an angel and gambles like the devil. Lucinda Leplastrier is an Australian heiress who owns a glass factory and whose independent spirit is at odds with the conservative society in which she lives. Together they embark on the greatest risk of their lives: bringing a glass church to the Australian outback. A memorable story of two misfits who discover their place once they find each other.
Starring Ralph Fiennes, Cate Blanchett, Tom Wilkinson, Clive Russell, Bille Brown and Richard Roxburgh.
Newman's classy score for Oscar and Lucinda will appeal to many soundtrack fans. It features a beautiful theme for piano, orchestra and choir, lush orchestrations and a lightness of spirit that is sadly absent in so many of today's scores. It's very tempting to compare this score with Little Women, Newman's first collaboration with director Gillian Armstrong, because the two scores have no doubt a lot in common. Oscar and Lucinda is Mr Newman's first dip into Americana since Phenomenon and it's one of his most melodic scores in quite some time. On the other hand, Oscar and Lucinda and Little Women are definitely two entirely different works of music and the one can not be mistaken for the other. Of course, the former features music for choir and the latter doesn't, but there's more. Little Women is completely devoid of electronics for one thing, while some of the most interesting tracks of Oscar and Lucinda combine the orchestra and synthesizers in a most wonderful way. Track 3 (Dutch Hazards) features the same staccato strings as Little Women's Snowplay, but the added electronics make the music sound even more warmer and lighter. Six Rivers to Cross (like Floorwashing) starts off as a fast-paced, richly orchestrated scherzo and then changes abruptly into an ethereal piece of mood music. A truely intense combination of electronics, samples, orchestra and choir can be found in Never, Never, one of the most magical tracks that Newman ever wrote. Oscar and Lucinda is not only one of Mr. Newman's best scores, it's probably also one of the best scores of the nineties. This one comes highly recommended.
Street date: December 1997.
This score received the AFI Award for Best Original Music Score in 1998.
*Featuring The Paulist Boy Choristers of California (director: Dana T. Marsh, soloist: Matthew De La Peña).
Music Composed and Conducted by Thomas Newman.
Instrumental soloists:
It is with great maturity and a relentless capacity for versatililty that Thomas Newman has created this magical set of compositions for Gillian Armstrong's Oscar and Lucinda. Alternating between majestic orchestral flourishes and unsettling low-key atmospheres, the score offers a bounty of melodic and textural material, and will easily thrill fans of The Shawshank Redemption and Little Women.
The score opens with an expansive Main Title, "Prince Rupert's Drop", in which a minimal thematic fragment for piano, bells and pizzicato strings initially sets a surprisingly light-hearted tone that will define much of the material to follow. A wordless voice introduced into this texture then gives way to full chorus and orchestra, with a complement of bells and chimes, in one of the composer's most richly orchestrated themes to date. This principal material makes a welcome return in variations at later key moments ("The Church of Glass"), in contrast with the shorter cues developed in-between. Here, Newman has fun with several highly energetic scherzi ("Floorwashing," "Leviathan") - these pieces are scored mainly for string orchestra, but a tasteful palette of shimmering bells and the use of numerous flutes, whistles and recorders create an ethereal, almost bucolic atmosphere which benefits the score's quieter passages.
Of these, the highlights are too numerous: "The High Downs and the Sea" is entirely evocative of a cold, bleak landscape; "Never Never" blends a ghostly female voice with orchestral colors that are eerily affecting; and the so-simple pairing of piano and strings in "Two Gamblers" leaves such a heartbreaking feeling of nostalgia for these two characters, one hardly even needs the images themselves. "Six Rivers to Cross" achieves a brilliance of sound out of Newman's trademark textures - crystalline orchestrations built on deceptively simple, repeating progressions - bearing favorably comparison to the sheer buoyancy John Williams regularly achieves from his strings and brass.
This is beautiful, wonderful music - Thomas Newman at the top of his craft (James Torniainen).
Reprinted by permission. Originally published at Film Score Daily.
About the movie
Produced by Robin Dalton and Timothy White (Fox Searchlight).
Directed by Gillian Armstrong.
About the music
The soundtrack
Availability: in print.
Track listing
Total time: 55:25
Soundtrack notes
Produced by Thomas Newman and Bill Bernstein.
Recorded by Tom Winslow, Shawn Murphy.
Mixed by Tom Winslow.
Orchestrations: Thomas Pasatieri.
Music Consultant: George Budd.
Music Editor: Bill Bernstein.
Assistant Music Editor: Jordan Corngold.
Music Contractor: Leslie Morris.
Music Preparation: Julian Bratolyubov.
Assistant Engineers: Michael Zainer, Paul Wertheimer.
Recorded at Paramount Scoring Stage M, Los Angeles and The Village Recorder, Los Angeles.
Mixed at The Village Recorder, Los Angeles.
Album Mastered by Joe Gastwirt at Ocean View Digital Mastering, Los Angeles.
Flutes, recorders: Steve Kujala.
Double reeds: Jon Clarke.
Review
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