CONSPIRACY?: Why aren't all three of these packaged together?
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You’d have expected this trio to arrive as a boxed set, but for reasons even Dan Brown might be hard-pressed to explain, the Da Vinci Code soundtrack is on Decca instead of Sony. That aside, Hans Zimmer’s score is as conventional as Ron Howard’s movie, with unfamilar (anagrammatic?) titles like “Daniel’s 9th Cipher” and “The Citrine Cross” but otherwise the expected inspirational pseudo-mediævalisms. It peaks with Tom Hanks’s epiphany at the Louvre, a brooding, pulsing, ever-modulating, never-resolving four-minute crescendo that works best if you’ve just seen the film. Then, over the end credits, Richard Harvey’s mod-modal “Kyrie for Mary Magdalene.” No revelations here. “Music inspired by The Da Vinci Code,” Jan Kisjes's The Da Vinci Code Project (Sony Classics) originated in the Netherlands, but its 14 tracks take in Latin, French, English, and “Scottish” (as in “Revelation o’ the Truth”) as they spew the likes of “Fibonacci gave us/A key t’ find the truth/Elle est possedée par/Les voix du mal./We have to stop her, now!” and “Sarah, my sweet little darlin’/You’re a very special child/Your father was the only son of God.” These sacred truths are rendered in an unvarying beackbeat-heavy 4/4 with bells, whispers, organ, strings, accordion, piano, and Phil Cunningham’s whistles. Europopchant, Europopchorus, Europopdivas, and a Maurice Chevalier wanna-be = Europopdrivel.
Da Vinci: Music from His Time is a generous 70 minutes from the Sony vaults, mostly recordings by Paul van Nevel’s Huelgas Ensemble and Konrad Ruhland’s Capella Antiqua München, that’s heavy on Josquin des Prés and light on dance music and Johannes Ockeghem. The performances are decent enough, but those who don’t go weak in the knees when they see Vitruvian Man on a CD-booklet cover might as well buy a Josquin disc by A Sei Voci or the Tallis Scholars.
Related:
Queering the Code, Keeping faith, Revisiting the greatest Harvard-Yale game, More 
- Queering the Code
With close to 60 million copies in print worldwide and a film version starring Tom Hanks opening on May 18, The Da Vinci Code is a galloping success.
- Keeping faith
His publicist calls Piers Paul Read "the anti-Dan Brown." She's capitalizing on a buzz - worthy name, sure, but it's a fairly insightful description of a man whose latest book, The Death of a Pope , explores not the Brownish theme of the Catholic Church secretly at work in world affairs, but rather its inverse.
- Revisiting the greatest Harvard-Yale game
It takes some doing to make Harvard look like an underdog in anything. But Harvard Beats Yale, 29-29 — Kevin Rafferty's 2008 movie (out now on DVD) and new book (released this past month) about the famous football rivalry — does just that.
- Seasonal adjustment
After weeks of tormenting audiences with gems like Failure To Launch and The Shaggy Dog , Hollywood seems ready to shake off the Oscar doldrums and unveil its spring collection.
- Heat of the moment
There's a reason comedies are rarely over 110 minutes, and Virgin is a good example.
- Bachelor party
It's easy to see how Wedding Crashers , the latest offering from the New Comedy Mafia, became the sixth-highest grossing film of 2005 (out-grossing The 40-Year Old Virgin by a cool hundred million dollars).
- Asia minor
In the early ’80s I often went to the Ding Ho, that ratty Inman Square excuse for a Chinese restaurant/comedy club, where I caught fabulous Boston comedians on the way up.
- Stunted Development
Watching the third and final season of Arrested Development , out now on DVD, it becomes clear why the show didn’t find a larger audience.
- Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Ray Price
With a collective age of 225, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Ray Price live up to this concert DVD’s title, which it shares with an equally superb studio album released last year.
- Scene and heard
Entertainment companies are pumping out music DVD titles by the hundreds, and 2008 will see a deluge of releases across all genres.
- Cracking the code
The idea that the viewer contributes to a work of art doesn’t seem as visionary as it did in the early 20th century when the Berlin and New York schools of Dada were hammering out new ways of seeing and expressing.
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Topics:
Music Features
, Entertainment, Maurice Chevalier, Tom Hanks, More
, Entertainment, Maurice Chevalier, Tom Hanks, Ron Howard, DVD Releases, Mary Magdalene, Louvre Museum, Dan Brown, Hans Zimmer, Less
