From All Music Guide: Recording Info: Air Studios, Lyndhurst Hall

From All Music Guide: It is tempting to think that even Hans Zimmer, a composer who has written music for cinema projects large and small -- mostly large -- for decades, would be intimidated by the responsibility of composing an original soundtrack score for Ron Howard's film adaptation of Dan Brown's pulp fiction blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. Apparently not. While the music here holds some of Zimmer's trademark dynamic and textural tropes, it is remarkably fresh and expertly nuanced. The high degree of melancholy in the first three sections -- "Dies Maercurii I Maritus," "L'Espirit des Gabriel," and "The Paschal Spiral" -- creates a remarkably brooding tension and a speculative sense of foreboding. The first of these, "Dies Mercurii I Maritus," with its piano and hovering stings, does give way to a large pastoral theme a little over halfway through, but even it is re-introduced by eerie, sparse strings (Hugh Marsh's solo violin playing throughout is his highest achievement yet in a career full of them) be...

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