Angela's Ashes: Music From The Motion Picture

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Angela's Ashes: Music From The Motion Picture

Artist: John Williams
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Label: Sony
Given that John Williams has his pick of much of the $80-million, thrill-packed boilerplate that comes clanging out of Hollywood every summer and fall, it’s especially noteworthy (and often gratifying) when he doesn’t exercise his option. In scoring Alan Parker’s adaptation of Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer-winning memoirs of his dire Irish upbringing in the 1930s and ‘40s, Williams has produced a graceful, autumnal work of compelling, though decidedly delicate, emotional power. Using spare piano and solo woodwind melodies filled with longing eloquence, Williams…
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Given that John Williams has his pick of much of the $80-million, thrill-packed boilerplate that comes clanging out of Hollywood every summer and fall, it’s especially noteworthy (and often gratifying) when he doesn’t exercise his option. In scoring Alan Parker’s adaptation of Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer-winning memoirs of his dire Irish upbringing in the 1930s and ‘40s, Williams has produced a graceful, autumnal work of compelling, though decidedly delicate, emotional power. Using spare piano and solo woodwind melodies filled with longing eloquence, Williams effectively punctuates a sweeping, largely string and wind ensemble. As he did to great effect in The Phantom Menace, the veteran leans heavily on his classical moonlighting duties for inspiration. Interspersed throughout (and also effectively underscored by his music) are concise, telling excerpts of the film’s narration read by Alan Bennett. —Jerry McCulley

Related works

Angela's Ashes: A Memoir

Frank McCourt

“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”

So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. Frank’s mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank’s father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy—exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling— does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father’s tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies.

Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank’s survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig’s head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures…

Angela's Ashes

Alan Parker

Because Frank McCourt’s bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela’s Ashes was dearly embraced by millions of readers, it was perhaps inevitable that Alan Parker’s film version would prove somewhat disappointing. McCourt’s book is blessed with subtleties of language and detailed observation that do not easily lend themselves to screen interpretation, and Parker’s film suffers from an overly literal, reverently somber approach that lacks the cumulative emotions of McCourt’s account of impoverished youth in Ireland. And where McCourt was able to…
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