Directed by Brady Corbet and starring Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones and Joe Alwyn, The Brutalist follows visionary architect László Toth who escapes post-war Europe to arrive in America in order to rebuild his life, his work, and his marriage to his wife Erzsébet after being forced apart during wartime by shifting borders and regimes. On his own in a strange new country, László settles in Pennsylvania, where the wealthy and prominent industrialist Harrison Lee Van Buren recognizes his talent for building. But power and legacy come at a heavy cost.…
For his second feature film score, composer Daniel Blumberg worked closely with Corbet from the start of the film’s seven-year gestation period, resulting in almost two hours of original music (including a fifteen-minute Intermission). The pair identified early on that music would need to play a crucial role in conveying the film’s central themes, not least due to the difficulties of depicting the inanimate form of architecture on screen.
The monumental scale of the score is on full display from the film’s opening shot, from the metronomic prepared piano motif that emerges from the sonic maelstrom in “Overture (Ship)”, to the delicately lyrical solo piano of “Overture (László)” and the iconic rolling brass harmonies of “Overture (Bus)”. Now nominated at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards and Oscar-shortlisted for Best Original Score at this year’s Academy Awards, Blumberg’s magnificent score sets the stage for The Brutalist‘s ambitious scope and epic narrative, which takes place over the course of four decades and was shot in the high-resolution, mid-century VistaVision format for under 10 million dollars.
To create the score Blumberg worked with a cast of boundary-pushing musicians and improvisers, traveling across the UK and Europe with a custom-built remote recording set-up to capture his players on location. Exploiting the tension between the fluidity of improvised music and the precision of scoring music to picture, he coaxed some beautifully dynamic ensemble and solo performances from his collaborators – German trumpeter Axel Dörner and British saxophonist Evan Parker among them.
Just as integral, meanwhile, are the solo piano improvisations of avant-garde pianist John Tilbury. Recorded at the pianist’s garden studio, Tilbury’s contributions serve as the inner voice and musical embodiment of the film’s main character, László, creating a living, breathing quality to the deeply personal onscreen story.
A challenge for Blumberg was how to create a coherent score across a narrative arc spanning the 1940s through to the 1980s. For a key jazz club scene he assembled a quartet (comprising esteemed players Pierre Borel on saxophone, Simon Sieger on piano, Joel Grip on bass and Antonin Gerbal on drums) to perform electrifying jazz versions of his theme live on set. The film’s closing cue, “Epilogue (Venice),” called for a radically different sound palette as the narrative jumps forward to the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale. For this track, Blumberg traveled to New York to collaborate with synth-pop pioneer Vince Clarke (known for his genre-defining work with Erasure, Depeche Mode, and Yazoo). Together, they transformed and interpolated the film’s key themes into a redemptive, dance track driven by synths and drum machines to bring the wide-ranging score full circle.
