John Barry: The Beyondness of Things

by James Southall

Recently, composer John Barry has seemed to walk off or get thrown off movies (The Horse Whisperer, Goodbye Lover, Cinderella) more often than he stays on, blaming Hollywood producers in the process ("I could give six hours of material on that subject," he says, and you suspect that in truth he could give even more). But Barry is a master of melody, and still composing great music, and so it was only a matter of time before he turned his hand to non-film projects. "The Beyondness of Things" is the first of these.

The composer's many fans will be delighted that the album is very much set in the style of his film scores. "I'm a dramatic writer," he says in the press material Decca has distributed about the album, "so it was never likely to come out as a long tone-poem. It's like a collection of short poems, with scattered thoughts and images, rather than one epic piece of verse." The hour-long disc is split into twelve movements, and each is profoundly personal, with inspiration from moments of Barry's life, or events and places that have had an effect on it.

A sure crowd-pleaser is the track 'Meadow of Delight and Sadness'; it's reminiscent of Barry's hugely-popular Raise the Titanic and 'The Buffalo Hunt' from Dances with Wolves. "It is about going to Montana and imagining what the land would have been like when the Indian was there and was king; it's also about what happened when Custer and his cavalry went in there and slaughtered the people. There is an incredible sadness in the land, just like you find at the battlefields of the First World War," says Barry.

"I wrote 'The Day the Earth Fell Silent' as a remembrance of the day I heard that John Kennedy had been shot, 22 November 1963. I couldn't believe that this young man, at the height of his life, had been taken away from us."

More powerful emotions are expressed in 'Childhood Memory': "One April night in the early forties, my convent school was bombed. My father and mother came to pick up my sister and me from school at four o'clock; a few hours later, York was blitzed and forty of the children and nuns were killed. Nobody talked about it at the time, and I still don't know how to deal with something like that. As you get older, you realise what happened that night when a bomb hit the cloister of a school that was thought to be the safest place in York. I remember going back there with about twelve of my classmates, and we didn't ask questions. That's very northern England and of the period. We strangely avoided confronting the total horror that had happened. It was only after the war was over that the tragedy had a powerful emotional effect on me."

'Give Me a Smile' is a particularly gorgeous track; the English Chamber Orchestra play it for all its worth, and the string section really shines. Delicate flute solos backed with Barry's trademark strings-and-horns combine to create an achingly beautiful audio experience, and the tune itself is one of the catchiest in the composer's vast cannon. At one point, the track was to have had a vocal by Corina Brouder (who sang 'To Love and Be Loved' in Swept from the Sea), but this plan was dropped (though Barry is eager to work with her again).

The whole album is filled with emotion and feeling; there are heartbreaking harmonica and saxophone solos, a laid-back jazz waltz, and typical Barry melodies played on strings and woodwind, along with the occasional orchestral tour-de-force; Barry's fans are sure to lap it up, as is anyone who enjoys particularly melodic music. I hope the album does well, because it certainly deserves so, and would probably spawn similar successors (maybe even from other composers).

Film composers who work in the classical world are not too common these days (John Williams is the obvious exception, and Michael Kamen has written several ballets, concerti for saxophone and guitar, and is currently writing his first symphony), and it is good to see Decca giving this album a lot of publicity. For too long, the classical music community has turned its collective nose up at film music, but recently there are signs that things might be changing. For starters, three prominent composers (James Horner, Kamen and Barry) now have exclusive contracts with record labels, and people like Eza-Pekka Salonen and Ricardo Muti are to be found conducting film music compilations (of Bernard Herrmann and Nino Rota respectively).

Overall, this album comes highly recommended. It is released on Decca in Britain on April 14 (CD 460 009)--the U.S. release is now until September, however--and will receive its premiere concert performance on April 18 in the London concert conducted by Barry himself (also featuring music from his whole career). Call 171-589-8212 for info; it may already be sold out!

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