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John Towner Williams: Memoirs of a Geisha

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Sony Classical
Released: 2005.11.22
Time:
 61:02
Category: Soundtrack
Producer(s): John Towner Williams
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.jwfan.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 1,00





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Sayuri's Theme (J.T.Williams) - 1:31
[2] The Journey to the Hanamachi (J.T.Williams) - 4:06
[3] Going to School (J.T.Williams) - 2:42
[4] Brush on Silk (J.T.Williams) - 2:31
[5] Chiyo's Prayer (J.T.Williams) - 3:36
[6] Becoming a Geisha (J.T.Williams) - 4:52
[7] Finding Satu (J.T.Williams) - 3:44
[8] The Chairman's Waltz (J.T.Williams) - 2:39
[9] The Rooftops of the Hanamachi (J.T.Williams) - 3:49
[10] The Garden Meeting (J.T.Williams) - 2:44
[11] Dr. Crab's Prize (J.T.Williams) - 2:18
[12] Destiny's Path (J.T.Williams) - 3:20
[13] A New Name... A New Life (J.T.Williams) - 3:33
[14] The Fire Scene and the Coming of War (J.T.Williams) - 6:48
[15] As the Water... (J.T.Williams) - 2:01
[16] Confluence (J.T.Williams) - 3:42
[17] A Dream Discarded (J.T.Williams) - 2:00
[18] Sayuri's Theme and End Credits (J.T.Williams) - 5:06

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


John Towner Williams - Conductor, Producer
The Hollywood Studio Symphony - Orchestra

Yo-Yo Ma - Cello
Itzhak Perlman - Violin

John Sponsler - Synthesizer Programming
Tom Gire - Synthesizer Programming

Pro Musica Nipponia - Ensemble
Hiromi Hashibe - Koto
Masayo Ishigure - Koto
Masae Yoshizawa - Shakuhachi
Masakazu Yoshizawa - Shakuhachi

Paul Cremo - Soundtrack Executive Producer
Rob Marshall - Executive Producer
Shawn Murphy - Audio Engineer, Mixing, Recording
Ramiro Belgardt - Editing
Kenneth Karman - Editing
Ken Wannberg - Editing
Pat Sullivan - Mastering
Susanne Cerha - Art Direction, Design Direction
Michelle Errante - Product Manager
Tammy Van Aken - Packaging Manager
Jo Ann Kane - Music Preparation
Sandy De Crescent - Contractor
Lia Vollack - Executive in Charge of Music

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


2005 CD Sony Classical 82876-77857-2

Memoirs of a Geisha is the original soundtrack, on the Sony Classical label, of the 2005 Academy Award- and Golden Globe Award-winning film Memoirs of a Geisha starring Zhang Ziyi, Ken Watanabe, Koji Yakusho and Gong Li. The original score and songs were composed and conducted by John Williams. The album won the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score, BAFTA Award for Best Film Music and the Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. It was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score but lost to the original score of the film Brokeback Mountain.



John Williams skillfully utilizes the formidable talents of renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and equally beloved violinist Itzhak Perlman to flesh out director Rob Marshall's celluloid rendering of the bestselling novel by Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha. Elegant and predictable, Williams sticks to the source, building grand Western themes off of traditional Japanese melodies with a heady mix of regional instrumentation (shakuhachi and koto) and cinematic know-how. This is the composer at his most refined and nuanced, providing a textbook example of professional composition that revels in its subject matter without ever intruding.

James Christopher Monger - All Music Guide



John Williams has been having a very busy year. He wrote his last Star Wars score, then took on alien invaders in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds. Currently he is finishing up recording his score to Spielberg's drama, Munich, but somehow he also managed to find time to write a score for Rob Marshall's film version of the hit novel Memoirs of a Geisha. Starring a pan-Asian cast including Zhang Ziyi, Ken Watanabe and Michelle Yeoh, the film follows the story of Sayuri (Ziyi), an impoverished Japanese girl who is sold by her parents and taken to the Hanamachi.

The album beings with a concert version of "Sayuri's Theme", with Yo-Yo Ma providing the stirring cello solo. It's a simple yet effective melody - one you will hear quite a lot on the album. "Journey to the Hanamachi" is a dark cue, with percussion and Japanese flutes, that ends with a solid statement of Sayuri's theme. When Williams isn't giving us different renditions of this theme ("Becoming a Geisha", "A New Name... A New Life", "Confluence"), he's delivering Japanese styled underscore. "Going to School" is a playful energetic track, and "Brush on Silk" is a tense percussion-based cue that has a burst of dissonance.

A new theme - and a new soloist - appear in "The Chairman's Waltz", with Itzhak Perlman providing an emotionally tinged performance on the violin. The melody is full of longing and could easily stand as a distant cousin to the main theme from Schindler's List. The Chairman (Watanabe) gave Sayuri hope as a child, and she never forgot it - and as the film progresses, her secret love and devotion to him - as well as the times their paths cross - allows Williams to come up with a very variations on the theme, performed even at times on the brass ("The Fire Scene and the Coming of War"). This aforementioned cue also features an excerpt from the Japanese opera "Ogi No Mato (The Folding Fan as a Target)", and might seem out of place on the album, but works quite well in the film.

The album ends with "Sayuri's Theme and End Credits", and solid 5-minute track that encapsulates the energy, emotion, and drama within the film, projected as music. Williams has done an excellent job with Memoirs of a Geisha, delivering a score that shows that he is truly a master of the craft. I've yet to hear anything from Munich, but until such time, Memoirs of a Geisha is an easy pick for one of the best scores of 2005.

[4/5]

Dan Goldwasser - November 16th, 2005
Soundtrack.net



Memoirs of a Geisha: (John Williams) It's taken four years for this long-anticipated project to finally debut on the big screen. The internationally acclaimed novel of the same name by Arthur Golden tells the story of Nitta Sayuri, sold to a geisha house at the age of nine and eventually trained to be among the best in the trade. Not only does the film follow her young progression, but also culminates in her love for a kind, but unreachable patron. As much a historical documentary as it is a close character story, Memoirs of a Geisha is a project that immediately attracted the very public attention of director Steven Spielberg, and a film adaptation was to be one of his triumphs sometime between 2001 and 2003. Scheduling conflicts and studio bickering over the rights to the next film of final director Rob Marshall delayed the film's production until 2005, but no less was the anticipation for such a promising adaptation. One person who made sure to work Memoirs of a Geisha into his schedule was composer John Williams, whose relationship with Spielberg is so strong that he composed music for both this film and Munich (the 1972 Olympics docudrama) in 2005 rather than continue his relationship with the Harry Potter franchise. Williams, like Spielberg, has had Memoirs of a Geisha on his radar for many years, having fallen in love with Golden's novel, and has long planned to use it as an opportunity to collaborate with two of his favorite performers: Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. Having worked first with violinist Perlman on Schindler's List in 1993, a score that has achieved legendary status in the modern history of film music, Williams then collaborated with cellist Ma on the far less successful Seven Years in Tibet in 1997. Williams would conduct both artists in separate concerns thereafter, producing albums of those performances with Perlman and Ma individually. There is no doubt that Williams' writing suits those two string soloists well, and it is no surprise that both eagerly signed on to be part of the recording for Memoirs of a Geisha. Their roles in the score are appropriately front and center, and an easy selling point.

As a character story, Williams' work for Memoirs of a Geisha is restrained and intimate, refraining from any semblance of the pounding, robust scores for Revenge of the Sith and War of the Worlds earlier in the year. The pace of Memoirs of a Geisha is relatively slow as well, being a light, rhythmically driven score for much of its length. It requires patience and attention to the details of the plucking and tapping rhythms beneath in order to be fully satisfied by the similarly drawn-out solo performances on cello and violin. Interestingly, it is Yo-Yo Ma's cello that makes a far more important contribution in the score, performing the elegantly beautiful theme for Sayuri herself. Williams then gives Perlman his primary role as the performer of the secondary theme served in concert form in "The Chairman's Waltz." While Perlman's performances are perhaps more intoxicating than Ma's in general, the cello really stands above and beyond the violin. Williams is very loyal to his primary theme, introduced in the opening cue, and it is Ma's solemn performances that provide the lasting beauty ("Becoming a Geisha" is the highlight cue). The evolution of this theme throughout the score is remarkable, remaining stark and barely accompanied until its climax in "Confluence," in which the full ensemble (including brass) provide one last noble statement. The concert suite piece appears over the end titles, and inserts Perlman's violin and the ensemble into the Sayuri theme for balance. The light rhythms that carry the minimally-constructed underscore cues are remarkable in their ease; only in "Brush on Silk" does dissonance interrupt the perpetually quiet and pleasant listening experience. The score is saturated with Williams' harmonic and technical styles, including a slurring of string notes that will remind of Rosewood. One interesting note is that Williams uses the shakuhachi flute in "The Journey to the Hanamachi" in much of the same wailing fashion as James Horner has done in his entire career (but whereas Horner does it everywhere, including his Zorro music, Williams restrains it to its proper ethnic setting), with the ambient sound design actually resembling Horner's Vibes for a few moments. Overall, Williams very masterfully illuminates Japanese styles and instrumentation in the environment of a Western orchestra to make the score enjoyable for the mainstream. But it is a very restrained piece until its final moments, so don't expect any level of pomp or bravado. Elegantly simple and undemanding. ****

Editorial Review - 11/18/05
Filmtracks.com
 

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