Customer Reviews

William Shakespeare's As You Like It [Music from the HBO Film]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Patrick Doyle tends to do his most gorgeous work for Kenneth Branagh's films, which give him the broad canvases his scores excel with. Most directors aren't willing to make their films so dependent on music any more. Many of the cues here are three to five minutes, with achingly lovely themes working their way in and out of each fully developed piece. The main theme, played by a solo violin, backed by the LSO, is especially beautiful. Bravo, Patrick Doyle.

I'm a big Doyle fan and have CDs for almost all the scores he has written. It's a shame so few people got to see As You Like It because it is one of Branagh's better efforts and it has inspired a lovely score by Patrick Doyle. As another reviewer has noted, there is a wonderful piece for violin at the end of the CD.

I attended a music lecture by Seattle Symphony music director/principal conductor Gerard Schwarz several years ago. When asked what he thought of modern film scores/soundtracks as music, Schwarz commented on the fact that the film composer didn't have to worry about development of his/her themes, since all that was needed was the theme itself, often in variation, to serve the purpose of the film with enough music to match a scene of 2 to 3 minutes duration. That's certainly true, but I don't mind a beautiful aria that only lasts a couple of minutes, complete in itself, part of a larger piece or not.

Patrick Doyle's soundtracks have given me as much musical pleasure as any opera, symphony and/or ballet works since I first saw Henry V of Branagh, and rushed to buy the fantastic soundtrack to the film. I've been collecting Doyle's compositions ever since, and have enjoyed his Branagh collaborations because as a previous reviewer mentioned, the combination seems to bring out the best in Doyle. Along with Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Sense & Sensibility, Love's Labour's Lost and now this gorgeous As You Like It, I'd rank Doyle's work with Carter Burwell's Rob Roy, Jocelyn Pook's The Merchant of Venice, Richard Robbin's Maurice, Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings, Shaun Davey's Twelfth Night and Shigeru Umebayashi's House of Flying Daggers. Highly recommended to all classical music lovers, not just soundtrack enthusiasts.

One of the two best things about this film (the other was the forest setting), Doyle's score is absolutely ravishing. He seems to do his best work for Branagh (even when the movie itself isn't so great), and this ranks among Doyle's finest. Often recalling (in spirit, at least) Puccini's "Butterfly", it is lush and romantic. Well worth purchasing for several of the tracks, the "Violin Romance" performed by Joshua Bell makes this an essential recording to own. Have you placed your order yet?