Creation (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Nineteenth-century English naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution might well be the single most challenging scientific idea to threaten the social-religious order in a millennia, spurring a rift that extended as far as Darwin’s own marriage to a fundamentalist Christian, the personal conflict that’s central to director Jon Amiel’s artfully restrained biopic. Composer Christopher Young musically evokes the emotional/philosophical complexities of the Darwins’ relationship, delivering a score that deftly colors that interior emotional landscape with dignity and grace. Centered on intimate chamber arrangements dominated by strings, woodwinds, haunting piano figures and unabashedly emotional solo violin motifs, the contemporary contours of Young’s score gently contrast the film’s period setting, occasionally recalling the equally centered, delicately brooding work of English colleague Rachel Portman. Yet by the soundtrack’s final cues, Young also manages the not inconsiderable task of fusing his delicate themes for piano and solo violin with hypnotic, minimalist-influenced orchestral cascades, a masterful marriage of melancholy and modernism.