Angels in America: Music from the HBO Film

Playwright Tony Kushner adapted his sprawling meditation on the AIDS epidemic of the 80's into an equally epic, Mike Nichols-directed HBO miniseries. But while Thomas Newman’s score spans that dramatic landscape with rich stylistic diversity, the young champion of the daunting Newman family musical tradition (his father was Fox legend Alfred; his brother fellow film scorer David; his cousin songwriter/composer Randy) never lets musical bombast get in the way of compelling emotional introspection. Anchored by a delicate wind and string-driven main theme that’s as mature as it is bittersweet, Newman proceeds to explore some of the same adventurous, rhythmically restless soundscapes that characterized his work on Erin Brockovich and American Beauty. But that typically moody experimentalism is leavened elsewhere by moments of neo-baroque choral exultation, smokey 30's jazz (courtesy of George Lewis and his Ragtime Band and Duke Ellington) and even flashes of gospel and orchestral post-modernism, all of it served up with a masterful sense of irony-free restraint that’s become one of the composer’s most refreshing hallmarks. It’s easily one of Newman’s -- and 2003's -- most accomplished and satisfying film scores. --Jerry McCulley