Track Listing

1. Molly
2. Eddie
3. Nadia
4. Dan
5. Debbie
6. Bill
7. Eileen
8. Jack
9. Darren
10. Unamed
11. Franklyn

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22777 in Music
• Released on: 1999-08-30
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Soundtrack

Amazon.co.uk Review
The music here may not be as colourful as the gaudy packaging and film, but it's certainly further proof of a maturing filmic style from Nyman. Like Gattaca there's a lot of reliance on strings within the Band. It makes for a sense of melancholia that lasts the 40-minute running time. "Molly" to "Franklyn" is a gentle ride. They both feature Nyman on piano leading his endearing rolling motif, which pops up through many of the other tracks--all of which are named after characters in the film. Of them, "Dan" gets the most upbeat version of one of the secondary themes. All of Nyman's scores feature that distinctive Nyman sound, but this one is perhaps best described as taking the non-piano melodiousness of The Piano and going that little bit further. --Paul Tonks

Customer Reviews

The best album ever
Quite simply this is the most sublime and heart achingly beautiful soundtrack I have ever heard. It will transport you completely. I saw the film and was struck by the music - and to listen to it again is rapturous. I can't recommend this highly enough. Don't be put off if you don't like The Piano music - I don't particularly. But if you like film scores like Glory then you'll love this.

Orchestrated Melancholia
This is somewhat different to Nyman’s other soundtracks, only in as much that the use of music throughout Winterbottom’s masterpiece is conceptual… in that each character has their own tune assigned to them, which then reoccurs in various re-arrangements whenever that character appears throughout. This is pretty obvious from the titles of the selections featured herein. However, this means that many of the tracks don’t gel as well as say, the soundtrack to The End of the Affair, in which we actually get a sense of the film’s themes through the continual playing of Nyman’s music.

Here the compositions are, for the most part, much shorter than what Nyman is know for (thinking specifically about works like Miranda from Prospero’s Books or Memorial from the Cook the Thief...) often clocking in at around the three of four minute mark. This makes the composer’s melancholic production easier to take, as the music becomes a reflection of the misery of the film with its reliance on mournful string arrangements built around a minimal piano composition. Though it’s is epic in it’s own right, this is a much more intimate work than the score for say, The Piano, and certainly reflects more of the lyrical poetry found in Winterbottom’s film.

This is a lovely collection of compositions following on in the more humanistic design established on his soundtrack for the early Gattaca that are certainly worth you’re attention. It may be more demanding than the early (fun) works such as A Zed & Two Noughts and the Draughtsman’s Contract, but it’s certainly an important part of Nyman’s evolution as a one of the greatest neo-classical composers of the last century... and a worth addition to your CD collection. P.S. don’t forget to see the film as well.

Nyman's Sublime Wonderland
The score written by Michael Nyman for Michael Winterbottom's film "Wonderland" is one of the most simple and yet sublime pieces I've ever heard. It is incredible the way that Nyman expresses such intense emotions from seemingly so simple and probably unpromising materials.

This is mature Nyman at his best, far from the dazzling neo-baroque exercises for the Greenaway films (great they were indeed), the british composer writes now in a less spectacular manner but defintively in a deeper and more senstitive way. His orchestrations are here delightfully thin, almost ethereal (relying mostly on strings), while some piano solo's become pristine poetry.

With Wonderland Nyman has achievd beauty in simplicity, with music that goes, rather than to our ears ... straight to our hearts.