Search - Armand Amar :: Amen: Music From the Motion Picture

From Z to Missing, and beyond, Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras has focused his career on history-based dramas that turn on intertwined moral and political dilemmas. The director's tale of a Nazi chemist and a Vatican insider struggling against complicity in the Holocaust is gifted here by a rich, surprisingly mature score by young French composer Armand Amar. Turning on a dynamic mix of pulsing orchestra, spare piano passages (via soloist/score arranger Laurent Levesque, who also wrote "The Bishop's Complaint" cue here), melancholy alto violin solos (by Jean-Paul Minali Bella) and seasoned with everyting from the baroque to Gothic, electronically suffused soundscapes, the composer skillfully evokes the story's historical drama, yet infuses it with a sense of contemporary musical urgency. Especially gratifying is his music for "The Train," a trio of cues where Amar leans on stark, rhythmically propulsive minimalist technique to compelling dramatic effect. --Jerry McCulley