Swallows and Amazons Soundtrack Review – Movie Music UK
The score for Swallows and Amazons is by Ilan Eshkeri, a former protégé of Michael Kamen, who impressed many with his score for Stardust in 2007, and who has written several outstanding scores in the decade since then, including The Young Victoria, The Snowman and the Snowdog, Justin and the Knights of Valour, and last year’s Shaun the Sheep movie.
The score has that indefinable, but immediately identifiable sense of ‘Englishness’ to it, a classical sound that feels like a Turner or Constable painting given voice through music, like Elgar or Vaughan-Williams or Holst filtered through the modern cinematic sensibility of a George Fenton or a Patrick Doyle (who I know is Scottish, but you get my point)…
I don’t know quite how to describe it, in musical terms – it could be something in the key, the chord progressions, the harmonies, the voice leading of certain instruments – but, more than anything, it’s something I feel, a personal connection that comes from deep within my DNA.
Eshkeri weaves a tapestry of three major themes to create his score…