The Ninth Gate

The Ninth Gate, Roman Polanski's supernatural thriller about a book that can summon the devil, features an appropriately tense and eerie score by Wojciech Kilar, who also composed the award-winning music for Bram Stoker's Dracula. Sumi Jo's ethereal, operatic vocals grace "The Theme From The Ninth Gate," and the City of Prague Philharmonic and Chorus lend a brooding, Old World feel to pieces like "Corso" and "Bernie Is Dead." Piano and strings contribute to the ghostly, romantic aura of "Liana," while "Plane to Spain," "Chateau Saint Martin," and "The Motorbike" add to the score's continental atmosphere. Suspenseful in its own right, Kilar's music for The Ninth Gate reaffirms his skill as a film composer.

Director Roman Polanski's film The Pianist is based on the memoirs of Polish classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman about his harrowing experiences under the Nazi occupation of Warsaw during World War II. The soundtrack album consists almost entirely of Chopin piano pieces, most of them played by Janusz Olejniczak. Most of those, in turn, are solo performances, although Olejniczak is joined by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Tadeusz Strugala, for Grand Polonaise for Piano and Orchestra. The sole non-Chopin track is the excerpt from Wojciech Kilar's score, "Moving to the Ghetto October 31, 1940," a klezmer-like piece running only 1:45 in which Hanna Wolczedska plays clarinet, accompanied by the Warsaw Philharmonic. Appropriately, the album ends with an actual recording by Szpilman of the Mazurka in A Minor, Op. 17, No. 4.

Even though she is a celebrated operatic star with many brilliant coloratura roles in her repertoire, Diana Damrau is also a versatile performer in many other styles of vocal music, including concert arias, art songs, pop standards, and songs from musicals and movies. Because she embraces such a wide range of material with affection and technical ease, she is able to move gracefully between the worlds of Viennese operetta, Broadway show tunes, and music from Disney films, with only the slightest indications from her well-supported vocal production and crisp diction that she is much better known for her performances of Mozart, Donizetti, Verdi, and Strauss.