"I had to establish not only the usual repertoire of music for a film, but a specific repertoire of piano music that would have been Ada's repertoire as a pianist. I began creating her a portfolio of material that I imagined she had in her head, that her fingers carried around with her, almost as if she had been the composer of it. It had to be a 'possible' mid-nineteenth century music but not pastiche and obviously written in 1992."

Emotive? Yes. Virtous? No. The music from this Australian film that took Cannes by storm accomplishes exactly what the composer Michael Nyman intended. The piano work is not polished or technically dazzling. The listener is not assaulted by thousands of notes flying by in order to prove virtuosity. The compositions are simple. The melodies are delicately laced exerpts from Scottish folk and popular songs.

The challenge to Nyman was to write the music of another composer who happened to live in Scotland, then New Zealand in the mid-eighteen fifties; someone who was obviously not a professional composer or pianist. Since the central character Ada does not speak, the piano music does not play the usual expressive role, but instead becomes a substitute for her voice. The sound of the piano becomes her character, her mood, her expressions, her unspoken dialog, and her body language.

As the film's soundtrack, the music fits perfectly. It is simple, honest, and even modest. As a stand-alone CD however, the music seems to ramble, then abruptly end, then ramble on with little to differentiate between the separate cuts. It lacks story. A lot of it sounds transitional.

Ada's music is described by one of the characters in the film as, "like a mood that passes through you...a sound that creeps into you."

Reviewer:  W.C. Uher, courtesy of Flash Magazine.