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ENTERTAINMENT

Review: 'Da Vinci' music a blessing

Hans Zimmer's soundtrack offers a prayer of restraint

By Porter Anderson
CNN

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Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for "The Da Vinci Code" releases Tuesday, 10 days before the film goes into wide release in the United States.

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Review

(CNN) -- Hans Zimmer's soundtrack for "The Da Vinci Code," Ron Howard's anxiously awaited cinematic gospel according to Dan Brown, is that most powerful of envoys: A model of restraint.

It's a dove of peace, urbi et orbi.

Urbi, as if to the city-state of the Vatican, Zimmer delivers a quiet, meditative rustle of commanding majesty. A walk down his Via Dolorosa may invoke sorrows disallowed by mainstream scriptural tradition, but you'll find this music mercifully untainted by the "Ave Satani" nonsense of Jerry Goldsmith's 1976 "The Omen" soundtrack.

This isn't as close to Carl Orff's galloping "Carmina Burana" as it is to the plainsongs of Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval Benedictine visionary abbess and composer.

By the time Zimmer describes "The Citrine Cross" in the CD's 10th track, a Bartok-wondrous celeste ushers in nothing more threatening to the Holy See's traditions than a gorgeous soprano conversation -- no more modal than Thomas Tallis, no more avant garde than Ralph Vaughan-Williams and as devoutly assured as both.

Light, not liturgy

That conversation is urgent, as well it must be. Brown's novel is controversial because it imagines a profoundly central position for women in the Christian faith, one that could challenge the Church of Rome's male dominance.

Without aping sacred texts, Zimmer relies in "CheValiers de Sangreal" on gathering beams of strings and muted brass-glow to fan out across the centuries of doubt between us and the origins of Christian mythology. That track, "CheValiers," already has begun appearing quite high on world-soundtrack charts.

And why not? Those who know Brown's book will understand the plaintive beauty of soprano Hila Plitmann's lonely solo in "Poisoned Chalice" and other parts of the soundtrack. Like Kathleen Battle's vocal arcs in Vangelis' 2001 "Mythodea," Plitmann's glissandi sail above the petty pulpits of earthly doctrine with an ethereal ease that argues for Plitmann's pairing with Battle or Dawn Upshaw -- or both. Indeed, let's give the spotlight to women in music, too: It's time for a Three Sopranos.

Zimmer's soundtrack finally trembles with a respectful grandeur that can fan tall flames of free thought all the way from the vast, gleaming floors of the Louvre to the most compact secret of the Priory of Sion. (Orbi -- "to the world" -- indeed.) After developing three key themes throughout his scoring -- with Richard Harvey's historic instrumentation lying closer to the café than the cathedral -- Zimmer rests the novel's case in a superbly modest, resonant "Kyrie Magdalene."

The film itself, which goes into wide release in the United States on May 19, will have its chases and big ol' scary moments, of course. No problem. Zimmer is an Academy Awards habitué whose nominations and/or wins include "Gladiator" with Lisa Gerrard, "The Lion King" and "Rain Man." He knows how to ride the roller coaster of Brown's populist prose and formulaic ups and downs.

But all you have to hear is the relentless build in "Rose of Arimethea," its piano tick-tock twinkling through classy chord declensions that would elude lesser composers, to know that he's aiming for something higher.

This may be Zimmer's best work yet.

He has served Howard well, flattered Brown more than his ham-handed writing deserves and kept things on a smart enough level to remind all comers that this isn't your father's thriller. It's our mothers'.

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