Listening to soundtracks on their own plays into a basic misunderstanding about film, where people see films as modular (“the editing was good”) rather than whole. But Clint Mansell, once of Pop Will Eat Itself and now a composer best known for his collaborations with Darren Aronofsky, makes a pretty convincing case for divorcing his work from the screen.
Aronofsky’s films are steady builds towards cataclysm, but this concert doesn’t always deliver their payoffs. With Mansell on laptop accompanied by a string quartet, guitar, bass, piano and drums, he can’t replicate the sheer weight of orchestral water in Noah, and the climax rocks out like a prog band in a pub – a problem repeated at the apex of the Black Swan material.
Mansell wryly compares the gig to John Williams at the Hollywood Bowl, and his work certainly doesn’t feature Williams’ romping themes, for better and worse. His new work for High Rise starts in a magnificently sarcastic simulacrum of the music used to market high-end property, but loses its satiric bite without a strong melodic anchor; the anti-capitalist visuals are also a bit sixth-form. But Moon, based simply around a searching two-note piano motif, is spellbinding; Pi’s junglism perfectly reflects a mind in overdrive; and The Fountain material, which closes the concert in hugely satisfying, sentimental post-rock, benefits from clear-headed themes. Mansell’s bluff Brummie chat lifts the evening further, with a funny story about Madonna coming alongside a moving speech about the recent death of his girlfriend.
Best of all, though, remains his breakthrough work, Requiem for a Dream. The debt to Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho music may be obvious, but Mansell’s utterly horrible string motifs – returning again and again, like the addictions in the film – are exquisitely agonising, melting into the horrified clarity of the central theme. It shows him to be more than the “middling talent” he claims to be here.
