Oscars Original Score Contenders Bring Underlying Mystery, Tension and Emotion for Maximum Dramatic Effect

variety.com:

Jon Burlingame This year’s contenders for the original score Oscar are an innovative and international mix and, for the first time in more than a quarter century, two musicals are among the nominees: “Emilia Pérez” and “Wicked.” Three are past Oscar winners: German Volker Bertelmann (for “All Quiet on the Western Front”), Americans Stephen Schwartz (he has three, all for animated musicals) and Kris Bowers (curiously, not for music but for last year’s music-themed documentary short “The Last Repair Shop”).

Three more are newcomers to Oscar: Englishman Daniel Blumberg and French composers Camille and Clément Ducol. For “The Brutalist,” experimentalist composer Blumberg supplied Brady Corbet’s epic about a Holocaust survivor’s challenges in America with a small orchestra score played by just 18 musicians but recorded all over Europe.

Renowned London pianist John Tilbury performs much of the key material. Tilbury, 89, “has a beautiful Steinway literally in a shed in his garden in Kent,” says Blumberg. “I basically moved in with him for a month.

I put microphones next to his face so you can hear him breathe as well. Brady really wanted that kind of presence of the pianist, the intimacy of that.” Highlighting the mystery and tension of Edward Berger’s Vatican thriller “Conclave” is Bertelmann’s music, which avoids traditional church sounds (organ, choirs) in favor of nervous string figures, explosive prepared piano and the colors of the Cristal Baschet, whose strange sonorities are the product of glass rods rubbed by wet fingertips. “I needed something that was ethereal, that had a spiritual space, but that also sounded modern,” says Bertelmann. “Also, with all the traditions of the religion, I needed something that came from.