Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows by Hans Zimmer

Album cover for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows - Hans Zimmer

The score was composed by Academy Award-winning Hans Zimmer. Zimmer and director Guy Ritchie traveled to Slovakia, Italy and France to reearch the authentic Roma gypsy music. Zimmer and his core musicians, with National Democratic Institute members, visited seven Roma villages to learn about the Roma people and "listen to as many musicians as we could." Deeply impressed, Zimmer arranged for 13 of the Roma musicians with their violins and accordions to join him in Vienna at a studio for a recording session. Zimmer wove this gypsy music into the score for Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. Besides discovering the wonderful cultural music, Zimmer also said he had never seen such poverty in Central Europe. A portion of proceeds from the soundtrack will help the Roma pay for necessities like water, heating and bus fare to get their children to school. The soundtrack also contains works of Johann Strauss II, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ennio Morricone and Franz Schubert.

<i>Interstellar</i> makes you think. True to form for its director, Christopher Nolan, the intergalactic sci-fi epic challenges our notions of space, time, and the limits of human ingenuity. Employing the grandiosity of a string orchestra one minute and the eerie minimalism of a solo piano the next, Hans Zimmer's score conveys wonder, excitement, and tension all at once. The plaintive melody that appears in "Cornfield Chase" and "S.T.A.Y." captures the love story at the film's center, while the enormity of "Mountains" and the vertiginous chimes in "Coward" express the chaos that surrounds it.