‘Queen Charlotte’: Kris Bowers on How Chevalier Inspired His ‘Bridgerton’ Universe Score

variety.com:

Jon Burlingame “Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story” has one of the most complicated, and yet stylistically unified, scores of any series this year — Kris Bowers‘ original score, the 18th-century period music, and a surprising number of string-quartet covers of 21st-century hits.

The Netflix series, a prequel to the 2021 hit “Bridgerton,” imagines a Black bride for England’s King George III in 1761, chronicling their initially rocky marriage and her gradual understanding of the monarch’s mental illness; flash-forwards to 1817 feature an older and wiser queen.

Bowers, who earned two Emmy nominations for his work, returned for the prequel but took a different approach. “This show needed a level of intimacy that the score for ‘Bridgerton’ doesn’t necessarily have,” he says. “My initial instinct was to write for a smaller ensemble, and to mic and mix the music in a way that was more intimate and tactile, a sense of closeness to the instruments.” He played the 18th-century fortepiano for the younger Charlotte — “it’s a very bright sound, with a very different feel,” Bowers says — as part of his chamber ensemble: string quintet (two violins, viola, cello, bass), sometimes adding a second cello. “The older Charlotte is more of that ‘Bridgerton’ sound,” he adds, “a bigger orchestra, grand piano, a more refined sound versus the grittier sound of young Charlotte.” In a surprising connection with another Bowers project, he was inspired by the music of French-Caribbean musician Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, just weeks before he got the job of scoring “Chevalier” (the film released earlier this year).