Lorne Balfe

Silva Screen, out now

 

A musical overview of the concluding series of the Philip Pullman adaptation.

With the third and final season of His Dark Materials premiering over the Christmas and New Year period, it’s not surprising that a soundtrack has come out with it. In fact, five soundtracks, and we’ll come to the episode-specific volumes in another review, because here we concentrate on the first release, a symphonic collection of tracks that’s what you’d normally call the season 3 soundtrack album. This seems to be happening a lot lately, with Bear McCreary’s Rings Of Power season 1 score having been followed by a release for each episode.

Here, Lorne Balfe – who has scored Pennyworth’s second and third seasons recently – opens with “A New World,” a slower and more swellingly epic take on the show’s main theme. This sets the tone, as most of the tracks do have the main theme’s melody at heart , in some way or other. In this case it conveys a sweeping epic flight over whatever wondrous sights you can imagine while listening, before pianos introduce “Emissaries” and the synths go to eleven along with the orchestra for “Asriel’s Republic”.

As the album – and truly it’s more a symphony than a mere anthology – continues, we do get some variation with the introduction of the choral element in “Father Gomez” for a hint of the sinister. In fact between that and the previous track, “Land Of The Dead” we kind of get an inverse of the tonal map we’d expect from a religiously-themed score – and that of course is appropriate for an accompaniment to Pullman’s textual themes.

Martial sounds abound in “General Ogunwe” and “Lord Roke,” before an element of musique concrete, “Metatron,” slips in with an almost Feidel-esque blend of ticking and tension which quite simply sounds like the sound of steampunk.

The score wraps up with more epic action and beauty, with the lively guitar plucking of “The Banished Angel” before its emotional and wistful conclusion.

What we have here is a wonderful His Dark Materials series symphony or concert, steeped in the theme tune, and soaring all over the place in flights of aerial views of all the mountains and cities and armies and, well, worldbuilding, that you can imagine. In shorter form, what we have in this release is perfect music to write fantasy to even if you’ve never seen a moment of the series or read a word of Pullman.

Verdict: Balfe has outdone himself with this album, creating a truly wondrous world all of its own, just from the music, and that’s what those great classical composers of centuries past so often strove for. Balfe succeeds. If Russell T Davies isn’t throwing money at him to try to persuade him to score the next series of Doctor Who, then he’s missing a trick. This is just awesome. 10/10

David A McIntee