I Love Peru

Composer Nick Urata (Ruby Sparks, Crazy, Stupid Love, I Love You Phillip Morris) turns in a charming original score to the 2014 film adaptation of Michael Bond's beloved children's character Paddington. The live action film about a young Peruvian bear seeking a new home in London was produced by David Heyman, who brings the same whimsical touch he delivered to the Harry Potter films. Mixing a cinematic English wistfulness with upbeat Latin themes, Urata has managed to create something that is both playful and, at times, disarmingly tender. The gentler themes, like the lovely waltzing "Journey from Peru" and "The Letter Home," blend austere piano melodies with subtle strings, while the more exuberant Latin-inspired tracks are bursting with percussion, brass, and Spanish guitars. A handful of additional songs featured in the movie, like Lionel Richie's "Hello" and Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild," pad the soundtrack, but don't detract too much from what is largely a fun and heartfelt original score.

This disc from the Bogotá, Colombia-based ensemble Música Ficta jumps on the fast-moving bandwagon carrying Baroque music from Latin America. It is billed, with unnecessary specificity, as covering "Feast and Devotion in High Peru of the seventeenth century," but like other releases in this general repertoire it ranges widely, including music from other Latin American countries and from Spain itself, and covering music of several centuries. The subtitle is a bit misleading but not seriously annoying, for all this music traveled quite a bit in its time, and all the lands that are individual countries today were simply part of New Spain.