Music Composed by John Williams
Rating: ****

I must confess, I was less than impressed with this score the first few times I listened to John Williams highly anticipated Memoirs of a Geisha, feeling that I’d heard all of this music before. When you have both Yo-yo Ma and Izthak Perlman in a score by John Williams, expectations tend to soar, yet all I heard were lingering shadows of artists’ work in Seven Years in Tibet, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and even Schindler’s List. The music simply failed to surprise and excite me the way Williams’ best dramatic scores have. Yet something compelled me to keep listening, and gradually my disappointment began to give way to serene admiration. Memoirs of a Geisha does tread some familiar paths, but once you get over the surface familiarity of the material, you’ll find a great deal of nuance and depth that actually gives the score a great deal more lasting power than many of Williams’ more ostentatious outings. This is not a score that will wallop you over the head with obvious highlights, but it is a score that builds and develops subtly and exquisitely, gliding through sometimes-pristine and sometimes-threatening soundscapes with deftness and grace.

John Williams

Frequently, I find that Williams’ scores tend to be comprised of numerous set-pieces that, while fantastic in their own right, are so self-contained that they never really bind the score together as a whole. Memoirs of a Geisha makes for a nice change of pace in this regard, as every cue genuinely seems to connect and evolve into something greater – the score works as a complete whole, rather than a collection of highlights. The music is not especially emotionally involving, but it does achieve a sense of serene beauty, almost a sense of stream of consciousness. The score revolves around “Sayuri’s Theme,” a simple melody that, truth be told, isn’t one of Williams most memorable taken alone. However, the theme’s simplicity makes it malleable and allows Williams to weave it throughout the score in ways that wouldn’t be possible with any of his more elaborate themes. “Becoming a Geisha” is great example of this, a tour de force that shows the theme breathlessly flowing back and forth from solo to duet to full orchestra against a bed of racing percussion. Every new instrument or ensemble that picks the theme up has something different to add, something new to contribute to the theme’s overarching development. Here, and throughout the score’s entirety, the orchestrations are exquisite. Williams’ perfect balance between the individual performer and the full ensemble has never been never more precise, the clarity in his writing never more exact – every countermelody and harmony resonates beautifully.

Of course, the attention Williams pays to balancing the solo performer with the ensemble is likely heightened by the fact that he’s working with both Yo-yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman. While anyone expecting dazzling new virtuoso performances from these legends will likely be disappointed (they’ve both been down this road so many times that they really don’t have many surprises left), both performers bring subtle but immeasurable depth to the music. With the exception of the occasional restrained duet (“Finding Satsu” and “As the Water”), Williams tends to keep the two virtuosos separate. Ma tends to be the dominant voice of the theme (and of the album, for that matter), and while it may be hard to shake memories of his very similar work in Crouching Tiger, he nevertheless manages to unearth the heart in the music, particularly in the score’s rare concession to surging emotion, “Confluence.” Perlman seems to play a more supporting role, but he emerges on his own in “The Chairman’s Waltz.” This secondary theme shares extreme similarities with the first Williams/Perlman collaboration, Schindler’s List, but it’s still a nice enough melody, mixed with just the right amount of stoicism and romantic melancholy. I just hope that the film actually calls for the Eastern European tone and that Williams didn’t just write it that way because Perlman was going to play it. The theme appears again in nearly identical form in “The Garden Meeting,” and once more in a far more menacing guise in “The Fire Scene and The Coming of War” (the opening of this cue unfortunately carries the score’s single misstep; the unbearable “wailing woman” cliché that really needs to be put to sleep). That last track is an apt example of the occasional stark bleakness Williams brings to the score. While the music never grows unbearably discordant, there are a few more disturbing moments amidst the pristine beauty. Along with the aforementioned cue, we also have the unsettling “The rooftops of Hanamachi,” featuring Perlman in a far more unnerving light, and the chilly “Destiny’s Path,” rich with eerily hypnotic minimalist patterns. These cues are nowhere near as cold as Munich, but they do bring a violent undertone to the serene surroundings.

The score also has its fair share of more strictly authentic Japanese music – extended shakahuchi solos and the like (“Dr. Crab’s Prize”). How well you take to these pieces depends on how well you take to atmospheric Asian music, as the pieces blend in effectively with the rest of the score but offer little accessibility to the Western ear. Every now and then, however, Williams manages to inject his own personality into these segments without undermining their Japanese authenticity. “Brush on Silk” is a great example of this. With koto, shakahuchi, and reeds playing strictly along pentatonic scales, the piece may seem like generic Japanese music at first glance. Yet listen more closely, and you begin to recognize Williams’ signature frenzied counterpoint (at one point, the koto even begins to play one of Williams’ patented action ostinatos). When he really pulls it off, Geisha is a perfect example of a composer melding his own personality with ethnic music idioms without undermining the vitality of either.

When somebody gushes about how amazing it is that Williams is still going strong after all these years or how he’s head and shoulder above of his peers, my first impulse is to sucker-punch that person square in jaw. Having said that, it’s damn hard to deny that Williams is at anything but the top of his game after listening to something like this. Williams has had a busy year, and amidst the epic heights of Revenge of the Sith, the uncompromising brutality of War of the Worlds, and stark anxiety of Munich, it would be easy to give Memoirs the short shift. It’s perhaps the least immediately striking of the batch, but it’s certainly the most focused and may ultimately have the longest staying power. While it rarely delivers anything emotionally riveting, Memoirs of a Geisha displays the captivating and restrained beauty that Williams has always been capable of but rarely sustains. Savor it.

Music Composed and Conducte by John Williams; Cello Solos by Yo-Yo Ma / Violin Solos by Itzhak Perlman; Recorded and Mixed by Shawn Murphy; Produced by John Williams; Availability: In print; Label (Catalogue): Sony Classical, (82876747082); Release Date: November 22, 2005

01. Sayuri’s Theme (1′31)
02. The Journey To The Hanamachi (4′06)
03. Going To School (2′42)
04. Brush On Silk (2′31)
05. Chiyo’s Prayer (3′36)
06. Becoming A Geisha (4′52)
07. Finding Satsu (3′44)
08. The Chairman’s Waltz (2′39)
09. The Rooftops Of The Hanamachi (3′49)
10. The Garden Meeting (2′44)
11. Dr. Crab’s Prize (2′18)
12. Destiny’s Path (3′20)
13. A New Name … A New Life (3′33)
14. The Fire Scene And The Coming Of War (6′48)
15. As The Water … (2′01)
16. Confluence (3′42)
17. A Dream Discarded (2′00)
18. Sayuri’s Theme And End Credits (5′06)

Total Playing Time: 61′02