Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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31 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Simply beautiful music!, August 22, 2007
For Becoming Jane, Adrian Johnston delivers an elegant score that perfectly captures the poignant and bittersweet, utterly romantic tone of the film. Johnston was given permission to study the surviving music books that once belonged to the Austen family in preparation for scoring the film, and that study shows. By weaving music from the period throughout the score, he gives this highly speculative "biopic" a genuinely authentic feel. Particularly notable is the inclusion of themes from "The Irishman" in the tracks "Bond Street Airs" and "A Letter." Also noteworthy are the tracks "The Basingstoke Assembly," featuring "The Recruiting Officer," and "Laverton Fair," featuring "Softly good Tummas" - both pieces of source music by Kynaston/Walsh and arranged by Johnston sparkle with energy. Track after track of the score features cues of music positively dripping with the sound of delicate strings and exquisite piano solos. This is music to think, to read, to write, to DREAM by - it encourages a quiet, reflective mood (perfectly suited to curling up with one of Austen's novels and a cup of tea). In this respect Johnston's work follows in the tradition of scores for previous Austen pictures such as Pride & Prejudice, Emma: Music From The Miramax Motion Picture, and Sense and Sensibility: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1995 Film) - all of the aforementioned films feature music that perfectly compliments the on-screen action, but taken by themselves the scores stand on their own as polished, unforgettable musical works of art.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the Finest Film Scores of 2007, September 3, 2007
Composer Adrian Johnston's superb, predominantly neo-Classical score, intertwined with fragments of Mozart's and late 18th/early 19th Century English "popular" music, underscores the bittersweet romance which forms the heart of "Becoming Jane", in which actors James McAvoy and Anne Hathaway give remarkable, quite riveting, performances as Tom Lefroy and Jane Austen. It is replete with fine violin and cello solos from a small chamber session orchestra whose musicians I have never heard of before, but whose playing truly rivals the best I have heard from some of the world's great chamber ensembles both in live performances and on recordings. Quite simply, the musicians have wrought a memorable soundtrack recording that's most noteworthy for the delicate, almost transparent, rhapsodic playing of the strings, and some refined playing by a solo pianist too. Johnston's original score is a richly textured musical palette which evokes Baroque as well as Classical music in some of the melodies. Much to his credit, from studying the surviving music books belonging to the Austen family, Johnston has conjured up in music, the sights and sounds of Jane Austen's beloved Hampshire, England, and has rendered a most vivid musical tribute to her life and work as one of Great Britain's finest authors of fiction.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is a Fantastic Soundtrack!!!!!, September 13, 2007
After watching Becoming Jane at the movies this past March, I had mixed feelings about the production. The music by Adrian Johnston is just amazing. I enjoy listening to it and my friends have asked me what music is playing when they are over.
If you enjoy soundtracks from P&P, Emma, Nicholas Nickleby, Little Women, Miss Potter, Sense And Sensibility just to name a few. You will enjoy this wonderful soundtrack.
Buy it you will be glad that you have.
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Interact With Your Music: Discover, listen to, and buy new music, all from the pages of SPIN's digital edition, free to Amazon customers.
DVD ~ Philip Culhane
by Jon Spence
~ Dario Marianelli
by Anne Newgarden
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by Adrian Johnston 
