Filmmaker Steven Spielberg effortlessly glides back and forth between gloriously unbridled adventure flicks and films of considerable social conscience. His long-time collaborator, composer John Williams, must constantly change tack as Spielberg swiftly reverts from outlandish shenanigans to the perceptive and the heartfelt; luckily Williams’s extraordinary facility is such that, whatever the brief, he always provides surpassing music – and his collaboration with Spielberg has regularly yielded textbook examples of the art of film scoring – with Williams’s music as technically dazzling as it is emotionally fulfilling.
Here, Spielberg gamely grasps a particularly thorny branch of American history in telling a tale which, in the main, does not reflect too brightly on the Unites States’ early involvement in the African slave trade. Williams invests Amistad with what are effectively two outstanding scores. The African sequences engender some of his most evocative writing yet: a yearning mezzo-soprano, deep-barrelled male chorus, pulsating pseudo-African rhythms and ethnic flutes conjure a continent in turmoil, the music’s inherent sadness a reflection on the terrible plight of the bonded Africans, with the mournfully glorious “Cinque’s theme” capturing all the melancholy, all the regret of an enslaved spirit. Lording over all is a memorable musical setting of Bernard Dadie’s poem Dry your tears, Afrika which opens and closes the album. For the film’s American sequences Williams provides, essentially, a second and separate score: trumpet, horn and homely string harmonies cry America – this is noble, dignified music luxuriating in simple splendour. John Williams has composed many outstanding and affecting film scores, but this seems even more impassioned than most, revealing a depth of feeling more usually associated with music for the concert-hall rather than the cinema. The potency of this music has led some critics to suggest it is often too intense, too overtly dictating the emotional balance of key sequences in the film; but that need not concern us here – the music on disc is enthralling – and Shawn Murphy’s recording is perfection itself. David Wishart