If the Oscars had an Academy Award for musical instruments, the cello’s cabinet would be chock-full of trophies by now. Soundtracks to films such as Memoirs of a Geisha (John Williams), 12 Years a Slave (Hans Zimmer) and Joker (Hildur Gunadóttir) have made particularly effective use of the instrument to add emotional weight, mood and atmosphere to the onscreen images.

The cello’s lyrical and more dynamic rhythmic qualities are also used to impressive effect on this album of selected film soundtracks by the Austrian-Iranian cellist Kian Soltani. A self-confessed film lover, the idea of creating arrangements of themes for an ensemble of multiple cellos came to him while still a student, when he started overdubbing himself playing multitracked parts on his phone. Lockdown restrictions provided Soltani with an opportunity to further develop the concept and ‘Cello Unlimited’ was born.

The album starts off in swaggering style with a selection of themes from Pirates of the Caribbean in which swashbuckling sea-shanty-inspired melodies combine with infectious rhythmic patterns to conjure up a sound world that works just as effectively without the film’s images, thanks to Soltani’s colourful and imaginative take on Zimmer’s score. At times the cellist turns his instrument into a percussion section by tapping out rhythms on the soundboard and the instrument’s timbral palette is extended further in a set of six short movements from The Lord of the Rings – eerie, floating artificial harmonics, sweeping glissandos and ‘on the bridge’ effects weaving around now-familiar leitmotifs from Howard Shore’s popular score, such as the ‘Prophecy’ and ‘Shire’ themes.

Whether yielding sumptuous symphonic layers in the chaconne-like ‘Love and Death’ theme from Perfume, splitting the ensemble into multiple parts in the opening section from The Bourne Identity or using more traditional melody-and-accompaniment in the powerfully stated theme from The Da Vinci Code, Soltani’s ability to shape and control each arrangement through his ‘one man band’ of multiple cellos gives weight to the argument that a well-crafted film theme will always offer unlimited scope, especially in the hands of a performer and arranger as talented as Soltani himself.