Press Release from Caldera:
Caldera Records proudly presents Zbigniew Preisner's score for Hector Babenco’s “Foolish Heart.”
The director in 1998 put his personal experiences in a cloak of magical realism. The plot device for his film is daring: Juan is a young man who is drawn into the circle of Jacobo and Ana. Jacobo is a photographer who claims he can photograph people and capture their souls. When Juan agrees to participate in his unusual experiment, he is astonished at what he sees: while everybody’s souls are clearly discernible, Ana’s is a blur. Who is this mysterious, seductive woman? Juan embarks on a dangerous journey to find out.
For “Foolish Heart,” Zbigniew Preisner wrote a deeply emotional, sensitive composition for small orchestra and solo instruments such as piano and recorder. The former introduces the main theme, a brief phrase that is repeated throughout the score in various iterations and that is both wistful, melancholic, and mysterious. Rather than develop motifs for each character and thus follow a leitmotif method, the composer found a musical voice for Juan’s inner life as the young man is struggling with an impossible relationship and finding his true nature as an inspired artist.
There is an ominous tension running throughout the pensive compositions even as individual instruments, such as the saxophone, get their chance to stand out and shine. Although the soundtrack forms a delectable, harmonious and consistent entity, Preisner reassembled the different short cues to form a new work that stands on its own, outside the images.
