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James Horner’s soundtrack for A Beautiful Mind is as psychologically intense as the film it so effectively embellishes.
Charlotte Church provides an appropriately eerie and largely non-verbal soprano to this remarkable motion picture score, yet one that would seem only quirky were it not so beautifully embedded in a musical stream that draws one inexorably and almost vicariously into the emotional turbulence of the Princeton mathematician John Nash.
There is an angelic nature to the shape and texture of this music, one that is able to turn demonic as the story line requires. Both by brilliance and by dementia, Nash seems the object of external forces, rising with supreme heroism (at least in the film’s version of events) to conquer. The music is there at each score, coaxing the viewer into empathic solidarity with this deeply troubled man and his long-suffering and preternaturally beautiful wife.
This is mood music of the deeply engaging variety. Its lush tonal landscape is achieved under the baton of the composer himself. The score’s vast range of volume and expression would certainly have made it a joy to watch in performance.
Alas, we don’t have that.
But we have this.
An ethereal, compelling, even gripping tone poem. Buy it.
Canter Bridge 
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