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EDITOR’s Recommendation September
2001
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Philippe SARDE Sister
Mary Explains it All. Lovesick. The
Manhattan Project OSTs 
VARÈSE SARABANDE VSD-6268 [74:44]
I will confess at the outset that the arrival
of this album has answered my prayer, if I am allowed a tangential
pun at the expense of the album's title score. At last, here is
an album from Philippe Sarde, the talented French composer, that
includes his delightful and shamefully neglected music for the
Dudley Moore and Alec Guinness comedy, Lovesick, a score
I have been yearning for, for years. Thanks, Varèse! Lovesick
(1983) is about a New York psychiatrist, Moore, who falls for
one of his patients, Elizabeth McGovern, and is guided by the
ghost of Freud (Guinness). Sarde's bittersweet dreamily romantic
music is enchanting, so much so that his main theme span around
in my head for days. The album includes a nine-movement suite
from the film lasting nearly 25 minutes. The score also includes
a pithy, almost sardonic Viennese waltz complete with accordions
for atmosphere for the Freudian connections, and a lovely, increasingly
dizzy variation on the main theme for 'Mesmerised' as the psychiatrist
becomes the love victim of his patient. . 'Cloe' (McGovern) has
a vulnerable, wistful variation that scintillates. Another variation
presents the theme as 'Obsession in ¾ time' - a glittering waltz
that also that also reintroduces those Viennese Freudian figures.
These also figure in a rather more shadowy form in 'Saul's Nightmare'.
'Alone' is a sad little cue that has a Fauré like grace
and charm. A delightful, clever score, perhaps too clever for
this slight comedy that disappointed the critics yet is disarming
and pleasant enough. Mention should also be made of Peter Knight's
magical orchestrations
Sarde's music for the television series Sister
Mary Explains It All is predominantly serene, peaceful and
gently flowing. If you love the music of Gabriel Fauré
you will love this score because Sarde has been clearly influenced
by the French composer especially by his Requiem. Childhood innocence,
and possibly romance is suggested by the carousel-like figures
of 'Innocence'. Nothing terribly dark disturbs the slow melancholy
of 'The Serpent' and righteousness mildly asserts itself in 'Redemption'.
Familiar hymn tunes, in arrangements by Sarde, are used as source
material.
The Manhattan Project's score contrasts harsher,
colder mechanical music suggesting a colder world of technology
with warmer more sympathetic material in sunnier, high-spirited
tracks like 'Ithaca', 'Escape' and 'Plutonium'. There is also
another rather nice dreamy love theme. The notes by Marshall Brickman,
who directed all three films, relate that, in addition to the
standard orchestral instruments, there was a fiendish-looking
synthesiser the size of a railroad car played - driven might be
a better term - by a diminutive Englishman who lost ten pounds
during each recording session merely from darting from one keyboard
to another.
An engaging album distinguished by the inclusion
of the ravishing Lovesick score that really ought to have
been the main feature of its promotion.
Lovesick 
Sister Mary 
Manhattan Project
Ian Lace
