Lend an ear Philip KENNICOTT Why do record companies insist on these cart-before-the-horse soundtracks? And does the music actually amount to anything?

I" don't go to the movies very often. I watch plenty of films, through means that don't require leaving the house, but when it comes to the mainstream, movie-house release schedule, I plead mostly ignorant. Perhaps that's why it took me so long to notice a strange phenomenon in the business of movie music. These days, I often receive a CD of a new soundtrack weeks before the film has actually been released. I find this rather odd. VVhether or not a movie score is good enough to merit a recording is a determination usually made by how well it functions in the film. Nowadays, the music is coming at you on its own CD whether or not the film is a stinker. In fact, it's certain to be released on CD even if the composer is a stinker.

I give most of these cart-before-the-horse recordings straight to charity, or worse, to friends with bad taste. But when Osvaldo Golijov's soundtrack for a new Francis Ford Coppola film arrived, I made a point to give it spin.

Youth Without Youth is set in Romania, which was an instant source of curiosity. Romania has been in the forefront of current cinema, winning top honours at Cannes and throughout the festival circuit. Its young directors are among the most powerful film-makers working today. I can't recommend films such as The Paper Will be Blue, The Death of Mr Lazarescu and 12:08 East of Bucharest highly enough. But with one important caveat for music lovers: there is very little music to be found in them. The hyper-realism of Romanian cinema is at odds, philosophically and aesthetically, with the mood-setting music that is de rigueur in Hollywood. Which is exactly the sort of music that Golijov has written.

I admire Gofijov. His opera, Ainadamar, seen in Santa Fe two years ago, is a mesmerising meditation on grief, filled with colourful, multilayered, densely rhythmic music. I loved his

La PasiOn Segzin San Marcos, from 2000, as well.

So naturally I had high expectations for the score to Youth Without Youth.

I decided on a little experiment. Given that DG got the soundtrack to me before the film's release, I'd try to glean as much about the film as possible just from the music. And here's what

I came up with: nothing. Although he has thrown a cimbalom into the mix to give some Romanian colour, most of the short bursts of musical data Golijov has produced tell us very little. This is a film, I conclude, about nostalgic people feeling nostalgic sunset. With a cimbalom following them.

The composer has always been a grand mixer of musical elements and styles, as comfortable with pastiche of South American sounds as he is with popular song and abstract orchestral writing. But in the score to Youth Without Youth, we get a kind of musical surface product that suggests a stylistic Nowheresville. Heard in the context of the film, I suspect it will be pleasant background music. But it should never have been released in the current form. It needs more weaving and stitching together to be musically interesting in its own right.

I remember Ainadamar, especially the sense that Golijov was writing music without the longer spans of development necessary to hold a big piece, or opera, together. He produced beautiful vignettes, with intense localised energy, but then they'd fade and a new one would begin. Alas, writing soundtrack music is only going to take you further down this route.

Indeed, most of the 21 tracks on the new disc are between two and four minutes long. Some are rather sweet. The title-track is a melancholy aria with a 1930s flavour, and a cimbalom fluttering around it. But too many are like one less-thantwo-minute track called "The Girl in Room 6", scene-setting noise with nothing to say to anyone who isn't engaged with the visual spectacle.

Visual spectacle that I haven't, of course, seen yet. I guess that I'm using this disc quite unlike almost everyone else who will buy it. For them, it will be a

This is unfortunate, and yet another sign of how the mechanics of the industry don't necessarily serve music very well. There is enough good stuff in Golijov's soundtrack to be spun into perhaps a 20-minute symphonic poem. He should have waited, and done the hard work of refashioning his scattered ideas before sending them out into the world as stand-alone music. But, of course, we live in a world of instant gratification, and the nexus of film and recording companies must be working in tandem to be sure that the minute you've seen Youth Without Youth, the film, you can instantly buy Youth Without Youth, the recording. Which is filled with something that sounds a lot like Music Without Music. (I)