Shutter Island (Music From The Motion Picture)(2 CD)

This pair of discs contains a wonderful collection of contemporary classical music. In most cases Amazon's tracklisting only provides the names of the performers, so I took the liberty to list the composers for the various tracks.
Ligeti's 'Lontano', an old favourite of mine, is also used to great effect in Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining', a movie that evoked similar emotions with me (although I consider 'The Shining' a truly great movie).

CD 1
1. Ingram Marshall - Fog Tropes
2. Krysztof Penderecki - Symphony No. 3 - IV. Passacaglia - Allegro moderato
3. John Cage - Music for Marcel Duchamp
4. Nam June Paik - Hommage à John Cage
5. György Ligeti - Lontano
6. Morton Feldman - Rothko Chapel 2
7. Johnnie Ray - Cry
8. Max Richter - On the Nature of Daylight
9. Giacinto Scelsi - Uaxuctum - III. [untitled]
10. Gustav Mahler - Quartet in A minor for piano and strings

CD 2
1. John...Read more

One of the great joys of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was the extraordinary soundtrack. Not satisfied with Alex North's original score, Kubrick went with a selection of classical pieces, some familiar like Strauss's The Blue Danube and others less well-known such as Ligeti's Atmospheres. That soundtrack became a classic and Shutter Island is easily in the same league. Like 2001, the music for Shutter Island comes from a number of classical composers and none of the pieces used was written specially for the film. In my opinion, the Shutter Island soundtrack is superior to 2001 in that the music sounds like a coherent score, quite like Bernard Hermann's work for Hitchcock in places.

For anyone interested in contemporary classical music, some of the composers represented here will be familiar names, for instance,...Read more

What's interesting about the score to Shutter Island is that none of it was composed exclusively for the film, but there's plenty of orchestrated music that fits the movie beautifully. Scorsese actually had Robbie Robertson, who worked on the music for The Departed and Gangs of New York, to find existing songs to use for the film. And to his credit, Robertson did a great job.

Songs that are alone worth the price of the CD include the utterly gorgeous and hope-inspiring composition On the Nature of Daylight by composer Max Richter. Lontano and Symphony #3 are beautifully composed works that lend to the sinister feel of the film.

Some of the songs (Music for Marcel Duchamp) are incredibly stark with almost no instrumentation, but still add to the foreboding feel of the movie. Songs like Lizard Point and Prelude - The Bay add a floating, atmospheric element to the score. And a few tracks aren't even what you'd consider music, such as the sound-effect driven...Read more