Jonny Greenwood's Norwegian Wood score is out in Britain

Nonesuch released Jonny Greenwood's score for Norwegian Wood, Tran Anh Hung's film of the Haruki Murakami novel, in Britain on 7 March and in America today. Three long songs by Can sit among Greenwood's string pieces.

The BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Robert Ziegler, plays Greenwood's music, and the Emperor Quartet takes the sparer passages, musicOMH says. Part of the score draws on “Doghouse”, an orchestral piece of his that was performed and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 last March.

The film opened in Japan in December, Fact reports, when the soundtrack came out there on CD, and Soda Pictures opens it in British cinemas on Friday. It is Greenwood's third major film score, after Bodysong and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.

Clash gives the album six out of ten and finds it sombre, a soundtrack that loses something without the pictures. Ben Hogwood, reviewing it for musicOMH, gives it three and a half stars out of five. He finds Greenwood close to mastering writing for orchestra but the score too even in mood, broken only by “Naoko ga Shinda”, a cluster of high strings over a distant drum, and he thinks the three Can songs end up as the album's defining moments.

Tracklist

“Naoko ga Shinda”, from Jonny Greenwood's Norwegian Wood soundtrack (Nonesuch, 2010)· Jonny Greenwood - Topicwatch on youtube →