| Amongst
Debbie Wiseman's recent successes was the wonderful score to Wilde,
a film about Oscar Wilde starring Stephen Fry. The two come together
in a slightly different way for a CD called Oscar Wilde: Fairy
Tales. Here Stephen Fry and Vanessa Redgrave narrate two of Oscar
Wilde's fairy tales; 'The Nightingale and the Rose' and 'The Selfish
Giant'. Both thoroughly
enjoyable stories are read beautifully and precisely by the
two stars, but the enthralling part is the expressive and passionate
music composed by Debbie Wiseman to accompany the stories and
played elegantly by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.
These two wonderful, swirling compositions are full of wonderful
phrases and passages that take over from the narrative for extended
periods and are never far from centre stage.
The CD also contains two other
Debbie Wiseman compositions billed as orchestral interludes,
entitled 'My Own Garden' and 'One Last Song'. Both are written
in the same stunning classical vein with beautiful piano and
violin solos somewhere between Debussy and Vaughan-Williams.
Although primarily written to support
the Oscar Wilde prose, these two main musical items would make
a wonderful release without the narrative, which though good,
would pale from repeated listening, unlike the superb music.
However, the CD is worth buying just for the fifteen minutes
of orchestral interlude. |
Andrew Keech
Music From The Movies
February 2001
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